Frank Stephenson charges a stuffed fish to the McLaren account

[haplesshatrackhackattack]

Hi all, I watched a Frank Stephenson documentary on Motor Trend TV recently and this bit reminded me of something . . .

Could not imagine charging that much to a company card, but also I don't have the imagination to create the designs he has, so what do I know!

The doc is a pretty neat history of his career, also in it he is working on what looks like some real vaporware flying car thing that even Jay Leno seems unenthused by.

[haplesshatrackhackattack]

@haplesshatrackhackattack aww man, if anyone anywhere was gonna like this it would be here. Can't win 'em all.

[RamblinRover]

@haplesshatrackhackattack It's good material. Maybe people are just still waking up.

Shipping a whole fish in seems extravagant until you think of it as a design study and inspiration that's different every time you look at it. The kind of thing you go and look at for minutes at a time and zone out until "I wonder why". Lots of macro scale and micro scale nuances that don't have a chance of coming through in photos.

...and failing that, "we designed this McLaren to be like this fish" is worth it in marketing moolah alone.

[phenotyp]

@haplesshatrackhackattack Frank's kind of a self-aggrandizing douche, IMO. The epitome of me-vs-we. As a counterexample, I'll point to Chris Bangle. Yes, him. He led the BMW design team by saying that he'd never take credit for the team's success, but will always take the heat for any of their failures.
This article on Form Trends kinda sums up my thinking on this, and it's something I've thought about for 20+ years. Frank kinda epitomizes everything that pisses me off about how design and designers are portrayed, and how some people are more than happy to stand on everyone else's shoulders, Yertle-style.