Design Rules

Over the years, the car has developed quite a following: Corvette owners gather at meets and show off their polished engines. So in the new design, the hood pivots from the front end like a lid of a gift box. That design feature offers a great view of the power plant.

The new design is also more comfortable to sit in than past models have been. To get that low, lean look while keeping the frame rigid, the car always had a wide threshold. You had to struggle over it to get in and out. The new car's engineers and designers found a way to maintain the frame's strength without blocking the entryway. All the things that make the car look sleek, without compromising its technology, take a lot of work. You look at one and you wonder, "Where did they put all of that power?"

The question on every carmaker's mind today is, "What makes a vehicle distinctive and unique?" When it comes to the Corvette, the answer is clear: the emotional response it evokes in people.

Liz Wetzel (lnustc1.jz3hlm@gmeds.com) is GM's first female vehicle chief designer and winner of the Automotive Hall of Fame's 1998 Young-Leadership and Excellence Award. A 13-year GM employee, she drives a bright-red Pontiac Fiero GT. Harley Earl, GM's first designer, designed the first Corvette, which appeared in 1953.

Bobbi Brown

CEO
Bobbi Brown Professional Cosmetics Inc.
New York, New York

I rarely think about design; I feel it. and I approach design more with my heart than with my head. So when I create something, I do it because it feels really good to me, not because I think it will go over well.

The design elements that are important to me are color, light, and texture. And what embodies these qualities for me are pictures of my children -- or pictures of any child for that matter. What do I see and feel in those pictures? The innocent simplicity of children. How uncontrived they are. How easy. How straightforward. Those are the elements that, when they're mixed together, give a design its staying power.

A lot of people believe that things -- chairs, cars, tools -- perfectly embody the essence of design. But when I look at a group of chairs, I don't see perfection in each chair; there's always one that's a little more perfect than the others. That's not the case with children.

Bobbi Brown's company has grown from 10 lipsticks on a table at Bergdorf Goodman's in New York City into a multimillion-dollar business. She has three sons: Dylan, Dakota, and Duke.

Chip Kidd

Graphic designer and writer
New York, New York

Take the average parking lot where every day you come across a clever device: the speed bump -- that elongated, bread loaf - shaped piece of macadam lying across the pavement.

What makes the speed bump a good design? It's a simple but highly functional object that's foolproof. It's not what you would call decorative -- but it doesn't need to be. There's a purity of design to it, based on plain common sense. Often, the simplest and the most effective solutions aren't dictated by style. In fact, the only real piece of dogma that I was ever taught in school was that form is strictly determined by the function it needs to perform. Accordingly, the generic parking-lot speed bump is a supremely elegant solution to the problem of getting people to slow down.

Take an alternative solution to achieving that same goal: posting a sign that reads, "Slow down." With a sign, you're faced with a bunch of decisions: What color should you use for the lettering and for the background? What shape should you make the sign? How big should it be? The beauty of the simple speed bump is that you don't have to worry about any of those decisions.

Still, when we're out driving around, and we come up against a speed bump, it can be a jolting surprise. Which suggests another important point: Design isn't always a pleasing part of our lives. But as the speed bump teaches us, design is necessary -- and it can be extremely practical.

Chip Kidd (ckidd@randomhouse.com) has designed more than 1,500 book jackets for such authors as Anne Rice, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, and Howard Stern. His design for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park became one of the most recognizable images of the1990s. The speed bump was first introduced in November 1979 in Brear, California. Federal Highway Department statistics show that these devices have reduced speeding by 10% in areas where they're located.