Designing the future
The style process
Project Brief
The brief for the new model is given. The designers meet and swap ideas and perceptions until they reach a set of common starting principles.
As the basis for the new project, they take the most important elements of automobile design from the past, and combine them with the very latest trends in styling. The designers have a profound awareness of the brand, and of the four key Alfa Romeo concepts: beauty and seduction, contemporaneousness, strength, and expressiveness. It is their job to transform these concepts into exciting reality.
Project Design
At the Alfa Romeo Style center, as well as designers and model-makers, there is also a team of technicians and engineers whose task is to support and guide the stylistic choices along the lines of feasibility, industrialization and eventual production.
When constructing concept cars and prototypes, these technicians collaborate in the design and production of prototype parts and assembly of the various units that go to create the car.
Graphics
The car’s identity also finds expression in the graphic elements, such as the instrumentation and control panels, with their sporty spirit and elegant form.
Graphics designed with an eye to the future that manage to preserve all the spirit of Alfa Romeo cars.
Style
30: that is the average age of the designers at the Style Center in Arese.
They all have certain things in common: they are young and creative, from both Italy and abroad, and are flanked by designers with years of experience behind them. They have an understanding of engineering and a consolidated cultural basis, as well as a cosmopolitan mentality and a strong team spirit. The guiding principles for their work are a creative drive, the application of technology, and the speed of conception and development.
From a pencil on a scrap of paper – perhaps a napkin in a bar – to a light pen, right up to the most advanced software technologies, the new car’s aggressive ‘nose’ or sleek profile takes shape.
Milling
Now it is the job of the milling machines to construct models of the car using mathematical formulae.
This process transforms the 3-D computer design into reality. Now the newly created model is carefully examined, and the first modifications are made, which are immediately quantified and fed into the computer, so that the car’s shape is constantly updated.
The styling model is then placed on a rotating platform in the presentation room and is examined in detail.
Color & Trim
Fascinating and exciting, the Style Center’s “color room” recreates a magical, highly suggestive world. It is here that the car’s aesthetic aspects are studied, along with the materials that will be used to cover both its exterior and interior, depending on the feelings they convey. A magical mix of motoring tradition and the very latest fashion.
CADCAS Mathematics
Working alongside the designers, software experts using CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAS (Computer Aided Styling) workstations transform the designs into models.
At this stage the bodywork, interior, and various functional aspects of the car are developed: from the air vents to the steering wheel half-box. Until a design is created that everyone is happy with.
Modeling
At this point a series of manual modifications are made, until the designers are fully satisfied with the end result. Then the process begins all over again. In the joinery department, the individual structures are created that are put together to produce a complete prototype, which is used to check that each piece is in keeping with the project and perfectly matches the other elements. It is the job of the modeling experts to see that the car’s bodywork and interior finish correspond perfectly with the dimensions of the bodyshell and mechanical parts being designed in parallel by their engineering colleagues.