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Car Design (Designpockets) | 
 enlarge | Author: Paolo Tumminelli
Publisher: Te Neues Publishing Company
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $15.00
You Save: $9.95 (40%)
New (19) from $15.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 291673
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 3823845616
Dewey Decimal Number: 629
EAN: 9783823845614
ASIN: 3823845616
Publication Date: October 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Book is new and in excellent condition. Cover sports minor shelf wear, with no blemishes or marks. Interior is 100% complete with no marks, blemishes, torn or wrinkled pages. Ships from NC, int'l shipping available.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Book Description
Car Design. The automobile has always been as much about style as engineering, not simply a means of transportation but a status symbol meant to impress others and project the success of its owner. Car Design is a comprehensive collection of photographs from European, Japanese, and American automobile advertising campaigns of the last fifty years. Lavishly illustrated with over 400 black and white and color photos of distinctively designed automobiles, this compendium can be viewed as a decade-by-decade chronicle of consumer culture since World War II or as an amusing look at car culture for enthusiasts.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Interesting ideas poorly presented, poorly pictured October 28, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Car Design lured me with its introduction's promise of insights and understanding of car design over the 1947 - 2002 period that it fails to keep. The author, CEO of a European design consulting company and design-school professor, presents a one-page introduction and a one-page overview of design trends 1947 - 2002, that raised interesting ideas I expected him to apply in commentary on the cars pictured. He also displays a very interesting "Design" graphic that names distinct design themes and portrays their emergence and interweaving over time. I expected the author to invoke these design-types in commenting on the photos that comprise most of the book. But the written descriptions of each theme are unclear. Most of the photos that purport to exemplify a theme do so only in the cases of the most grossly different themes - e.g., "new baroque" vs."wedge line ." Much more often than not Tumminelli fails to apply any of the ideas he introduces in his comments on the several hundred cars pictured. For example, his complete comment on two facing pictures showing a 1959 Mercedes 220 S sedan and a Volvo P 1800 coupe is "All for the sake of a wing: despite the baroque trend Europeans could not do without elegance." Or consider this comment on facing page photos of 1968 Pontiac GTO and 1967 Pontiac Firebird: "An evil look guarantees sporting performance." In commenting on handsome 1997 BMW 5 Touring and 2000 Alfa Romeo 156 station wagons Tumminelli says "In a fashion: sporty station wagons for a sporty target group." These are typical, full comments. Two facing pages of photos of the 1964 Ford Mustang are mis-labeled "Mustang II" which was a much later, very different-looking design and commercial failure much in contrast to the 1964 Mustang, leaving this reader to wonder how accurately more obscure cars were identified.
Rarely does Tumminelli identify the primary designers of the cars he pictures. The Designers section of the book is little more than an alphabetical-order listing. It comprises superficial "thumbnail" biographies of individuals that offer minimal information on their design distinctions, aesthetic relation to the author's design framework, to each other or to evolution of car design over the period covered by the book. Finally, the English translations in this four-language text are often ill-worded. Many of the photographs of the cars are poor quality, obscured by models or distorted by the center-seam of facing pages. What this book strives to do, though it fails miserably, may make it worth buying as I did, because independent of the author an imaginative reader could make something interesting from this material. That said, just don't pay full-price for it.
 Examining European, American & Japanese cars from 1947-2004 January 6, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
If it's a 400-page reference work examining European, American and Japanese car design from 1947-2004 which is needed, Paolo Tumminelli's Car Design is certain to fit the bill. Trends are displayed through original photos from almost four hundred series of vehicles and concept cars, along with biographical sketches of their designers. The color photos alone are lovely and outstanding, while the discussions provide plenty of detail. Recommended for the avid car design fan.
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