Sunday, October 28, 2012

Jaguar's Julian Thomson teaches us about design at @PSFK



For the design-minded among you, Julian Thompson, whose recent hits have included the Land Rover LRX concept and the Jaguar CX-75, gave a talk at the PSFK conference about design values. He begins with the question "How do you get a design story?" and then walks us through Jaguar's to address the issue of making the most of a brand's heritage while keeping things new and fresh.

It's a timely discussion because Thompson is also behind the new Jaguar F-Type which, according to his talk, is the latest in Jaguar's line of "beautiful fast luxury cars with glamour." Thompson doesn't shirk "the sad years of Jaguar," either, called out as being 1968 to 2004, when they "essentially made the same-looking car." Thompson's reasons for the malaise: "not only did we start doing market research, we started asking Americans what they wanted."