How To Become A Successful Car Designer Like Ian Callum

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Jaguar Land Rover’s Ian Callum is probably the best person to listen to if you’re interested in car design, and here’s your chance to learn how he got from a small Scottish farming town to creating the Aston Martin DB7 as a freelancer.

We always do our best to hunt down Ian at car events so we can chat about his obsession with classic Minis, wish to create the world’s next cheapest car or the idea of naming a new model after certain tall animals. He is a lovely guy who refers to us as “the troublemakers” with a huge smile on his face and won’t mind if I just keep asking him about the C-X75 over and over again.

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What I did not know is that he knew he wanted to design cars long before starting primary school, studied arts and engineering with the same dedication in Coventry and left the center of the British car industry to learn more from the best in Glasgow, following the works of Bertone, Pininfarina and most importantly, Giorgio Giugiaro.

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He also sent his first drawings to Jaguar at the age of 14, only to end up with the task of creating the new Aston Martin, the DB7 in the early nineties, which also happened to be the first full car he did. Not a bad start before all those other TWR Design projects.

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In this latest video from Jaguar, see how he got his start.

I can’t be thankful enough.

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Photo credit: Aston Martin

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Contact the author at mate@jalopnik.com.