Soon after being hired, I was given two days to sketch R1T tower racks for a Friday review. At that time, the R1T was just a clay model - no photos existed, the form was in flux, my car sketches looked like cartoons and I was trying to leave Friday morning for a roadtrip. In a flurry of workarounds, I built foamcore crossbar mock ups, put them on the clay, took photos, and did a stack of overlays, adding a few pops of Perry the Platypus teals and yellows to the sketches around 2am.

I printed boards and left on the trip, sure I’d made a fool of myself in front of my new teammates.

To my surprise, they congratulated me on my winning theme Monday morning when I walked in! One of the gestural sketches had caught the VP’s eye without me presenting. In less than a week, I developed the theme and worked with Christian Elder to build it in CAD to be prototyped for the LA Autoshow. The crossbars changed very little from the original design to production, which was executed by Christian Elder.