During my Senior year at Rensselaer I worked on special team of students in conjunction with General Motors tasked with developing an options package for the Saturn Ion that would appeal to buyers in the “Generation Y” demographic.
We spend a good several months doing nothing but market research, then sketched and brainstormed based on then, then made photoshop and CAD concepts, then more market research to validate our ideas.
Once all that was done we made some prototypes. Most of the prototypes were pretty lame and really poor attempts at recreating what was in the sketches. While not the prettiest thing in the world my good friend Brandon and I spent nearly 72 hours straight recreating, in the flesh, the most popular front facia concept. I had created numerous concept facias using photoshop and the marketing guys determined that the “J1” concept was the clear winner. The “J’ stood for Japanese as the design used queues from Honda and Nissan sports models. I was pretty pleased with the outcome.
Wow, I forgot how supremely vomit-inducing the logo that the idiot responsible for it came up with!