2008-04-01 Superficial, badly written and carelessly produced

Quite unforgiveable in a book about car design is to spread the pictures over the centre fold. This makes many of the illustrations nearly useless as the spine gets right in the way. This is quite daft. Often a picture which would fit on one page is centred on the spine with a mass of empty space on either side. There will be no design awards for this effort.

Other illustrations appear to have been scanned in from paper while a few are clearly pixillated as if printed at the wrong resolution. Overall, the book's graphic design is derivative, mostly modelled after a blend of Merrell's Car Design Yearbook and the RCA special publication "Moving Objects" from 1999.

Among the factual errors littering the book is a reference to "the late Geoff Gardiner" at Jaguar. The author meant Geoff Lawson who is indeed dead. Geoff Gardiner is alive and well and, as far as I know, working at Ford where he styled the S-Max and new Galaxy. The rest of the text is fluent word-salad by which I mean much of what passes for analysis is nearly devoid of any intelligible content.

What's to like about the book? It's glossy and has a nice front cover.
I'd recommend readers interested in this subject to avoid this turkey and instead to get a few editions of the Car Design Yearbook and also see if you can track down "Moving Objects" whose text is superb.