If you’re always either bored or completely repulsed by modern auto design and your drawing expertise extends beyond the realm of stick figures, then it might just be your lucky day. McLaren, the creator of the debatable-looking Senna and the also debatable-looking Speedtail, is hiring a new designer.
The opening is out of McLaren’s base in the town of Woking in Surrey, England, and it’s in preparation for the company’s goal of launching 18 new models or derivatives of current models by 2025. Those new models need a someone to help make questionable or non-questionable design choices, and that person could totally be you.
Here, like in all job listings, is McLaren’s vague description of the position that doesn’t give you much more of an idea about whether you’d fit the mold than you had before you read it:
Create ‘clean sheet’ high impact designs for concept and production programs compatible with concurrent engineering exercises to the McLaren Design Process (MDP) & program timing. Working to design breath-taking products that tell the visual story of their function.
You’ll also need a mindset that allows you to “keep a calm head, [and] see the situation as a challenge not a threat,” “put the team first and represent those who have gone before and all those who will follow,” “find incremental ways to continually improve,” and “sweep the sheds and give each other the benefit of the doubt.”
Again, like in all job listings, these requirements are all incredibly specific and helpful in the self-elimination process.
Then, finally, are the base requirements that provide some help in that self-elimination process:
Principal accountabilities:
- Create high impact content for senior presentations (2D & 3D).
- Work within the wider CMD, CAS, Clay & Engineering teams; to present feasible design solutions at weekly design reviews.
- Reconcile design intent, quality & manufacturing feasibility with aerodynamics, engineering and commercial requirements.
- Communicate progress and critical issues to the Senior & Principle Designers.
- Attend surface reviews on behalf of Design when required to.
- Input into Design Strategy.
- Be a role model, live the values and communicate the design pillars to other departments.
Knowledge, skills & experience:
- Education to Degree level minimum.
- Excellent verbal & written presentation skills.
- Strong 2D sketching skills; digital and analogue.
- Strong understanding of 3D (clay and/or digital).
- PC literate. Photoshop, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Alias is a plus.
- Basic understanding of ergonomics, aerodynamic principles & legal requirements.
In other words: don’t suck at designing cars and presenting them, know how to make a car go fast while looking good and not costing McLaren’s definition of a fortune, come with a fancy piece of paper from some school that you paid your definition of a fortune for or don’t come at all, don’t suck at drawing, don’t suck at modeling, and buy a #TeamPC shirt, because we now know where McLaren’s loyalty lies.
Just think—once you’re hired, people will debate and nitpick all of your designs on the internet, not the other way around. What an honor it’ll be.