There's A Reason Car Designers Have

[BrassFusion]

Heh. The problem with being an expert in a field that's subjective is that some people will dismiss your statements, no matter how much schooling/experience you have. My former boss. for instance. :-P

You must be psychic, cuz I am now totally gonna dismiss your statements.

As you already said, aesthetic is subjective. That doesn't mean your whole field is. If the car has shitty aerodynamics, for example, then you could say it's got a shitty design.

Right now, the car's just fugly, which is always a subjective appraisal. So you could say:

"This is one godawful fugly damn car."

Or

"The designers of this car have no taste."

Or

"What correspondence college gave these douchebags their degrees?"

But to say the car is poorly designed is something that can be measured in many ways, and until you DO have measurements that prove physical faults, and as long as TA and I think it looks good (in that Shih Tzu kind of way), we can't say it's badly designed.

[Msterbeau]

You must be psychic, cuz I am now totally gonna dismiss your statements.

As you already said, aesthetic is subjective. That doesn't mean your whole field is. If the car has shitty aerodynamics, for example, then you could say it's got a shitty design.

Right now, the car's just fugly, which is always a subjective appraisal. So you could say:

"This is one godawful fugly damn car."

Or

"The designers of this car have no taste."

Or

"What correspondence college gave these douchebags their degrees?"

But to say the car is poorly designed is something that can be measured in many ways, and until you DO have measurements that prove physical faults, and as long as TA and I think it looks good (in that Shih Tzu kind of way), we can't say it's badly designed.

Well... It's poorly designed in the sense that the surfaces are badly executed. (Poor continuity, sloppy transitions, little harmony between various elements, heavy proportions, etc) The paint doesn't help... No, I take it back... it does help. It's so overly complicated that it hides a lot of the poor surfacing. :-) True, here are no metrics to quantitatively analyze aesthetics, but any graduate of a college design program would pick out pretty much all the same faults I have. It doesn't mean people can't like it, I'm just saying odds are, that if a pro's hands didn't touch it, the results aren't likely to be very good.

And I'd be willing to bet that it wasn't even a poor designer who did this. More then likely it's some guy(s) with a shop that happened to have a good reputation doing bodywork and painting. They may be skilled technicians, but that's about it.

So yeah... I'm a design snob. Just like you're a snob about music.

[BrassFusion]

Well... It's poorly designed in the sense that the surfaces are badly executed. (Poor continuity, sloppy transitions, little harmony between various elements, heavy proportions, etc) The paint doesn't help... No, I take it back... it does help. It's so overly complicated that it hides a lot of the poor surfacing. :-) True, here are no metrics to quantitatively analyze aesthetics, but any graduate of a college design program would pick out pretty much all the same faults I have. It doesn't mean people can't like it, I'm just saying odds are, that if a pro's hands didn't touch it, the results aren't likely to be very good.

And I'd be willing to bet that it wasn't even a poor designer who did this. More then likely it's some guy(s) with a shop that happened to have a good reputation doing bodywork and painting. They may be skilled technicians, but that's about it.

So yeah... I'm a design snob. Just like you're a snob about music.

I'm a musical snob about things that are quantifiable! The only stuff I actually reject as being "bad" is stuff that generally fits inside one format (baroque, fanfare, sonata, impressionist, whatever), and then breaks some major rules within that format so it sounds amateurish- like they failed at what they tried to do for their lack of knowledge or experience.

I'm sure those designers MEANT to make that a godawful ugly car, but I'm sure Alonzo DIDN'T mean to put parallel fifths into what would otherwise be a four-part brass chorale that followed the rules of western harmony.

Some of those rules are flexible. The one about parallel fifth motion isn't. At all. It happens in pop music sometimes, impressionist, far eastern folk music (all the time, in fact), but when you're writing something that's supposed to sound like a chorale and you include parallel fifths, you're a freaking retard, much like Alonzo.

*meanders back to the topic*

That is a fine example of a shiny showy batmobile. If it had rearview mirrors off a semi-truck, THEN i'd start to wonder.