One of Jonathan’s many skills is pulling together a great virtual team and keeping them to his vision. For example on the CJ, I was contracted to do the design of the front end, and did some overall positioning and mood boards. There were also designers from Toyota and the Creative Director from Volcom, as well as a CCS student contributing ideas. All of that went into the hopper as Jonathan and I were going round on concepts. We did A LOT of concepts, probably 40-50+ pretty resolved front end ideas before one night I scribbled out the final sketch and emailed it to him saying if this isn’t it I don’t know what is, he pinged me back and 30 seconds saying “nailed it, that’s it”. That entire time we were also working the engineering team down at Burke Built Motorsports who did the final CAD build as well as doing most of the CNC’ing and custom sheet metal operations, so we had their input to work with. Essentially it is a coalition of super passionate people. Jonathan has the overall vision, and the attention to detail, and ability to keep us all on the tracks to make it all work… and of course he is doing that across all the systems on the vehicle, like getting Chilewich in on the interior materials. It is kind of amazing.
During the process on the CJ, I kept it pretty low key, only my direct boss and the VP of design knew I was doing it at the time. When it was done, I started telling people about it, and folks went nuts. Nike paid to ship it up to campus and show it for a week, as well as get Jonathan up so he and I could walk the CEO through it… which began his relationship with the Innovation Kitchen at Nike.
On the Bronco, Jonathan brought Camilo Pardo (of Ford Mustang and GT fame) on to lead the design. I was contracted to work on interior consulting and components, and the Inno Kitchen got involved with refining some of the details as well as giving feedback, and lending their rapid prototyping facilities so we could iterate a little more. On that Gauge bezel for example (which autoblog said was their favorite part of the interior ) Jonathan and I designed dozens of options, then had a bunch printed, we refined them, had more printed, then finalized the design and got into CNC’ing.
Looks stunning! I like all the refined but not overdone details. The stealthy color looks awesome.
What`s going on in the headlights, multiple leds/halogens?
Also, I’m obsessed with the name plate/badge letters on the hood of the Dodge. Plumbing the face of those letters is such an amazing detail, for a guy who makes letters all day…
In the same industry that gives us West Coast Customs, I’m so glad Icon exists. Those little details (the stainless latch!) just make the truck, let alone the under the hood improvements.
Now that answeres my unasked question, why Icon has settled for that Dodge as the next project. In my humble
eyes it lacks the monolithic simplicity that distinguished all other base designs the team had chosen to elevate
through their work so far.
In the photos I can not detect how far you reworked the rear fenders to loose some of that facade like effect that
shows on Lews photo. “Sculpting” something only from one side just doesn’t work on 3D objects. (A problem, that is
also visible in the new A and B class, to an extend.)
To make it crystal clear, this nit picking is absolutely coined on the DODGE basemodel, not on the work you and the
team did to it. Would love to see more pics.
) Jonathan and I designed dozens of options, then had a bunch printed, we refined them, had more printed, then finalized the design and got into CNC’ing.
