The Start of a Project

While finishing college and preparing for graduation, I started on a project that I had planned since junior high school. I only started very late because I felt I did not have the adequate skills to undertake such an endeavor back then. Even when the project was started, I had a faint feeling that this was going to be a long journey since my skills were still not up to task for such a project (in reality I did not need to shoot too high since this was my own personal project and not for a client, but I wanted to see if I could actually reach for the same level of skills that real automotive designers use out there). I could not afford to attend some of the well-known design schools across the country, so I tried to see if I could learn everything on my own, in my own ways. What followed is a journey that is yet to end, but has brought about some amazing and drastic things, such as incredible changes in my life and the way I view things in this world.

The true project started with some scribbles in a notebook paper:

Yes, it is a Chevrolet truck, not a nice BMW or a cool Ferarri... I have many reasons for the decisions, which I will get to later. Regarding the sketches, I was thinking of something nice and almost retroactive for a new Chevrolet truck design. I was quite disappointed by the "Ming the Merciless" front-end look of the 2003 through 2007 Silverado pickup trucks, and the GMT-900 Silverados, which debuted in 2007 were not any better. I was thinking of something a bit more solid looking, and more consistent than what General Motors was designing for their Chevrolet pickup trucks.

This sketch was pretty much THE start of the project, aside from the scribbles shown above. What I never worked on a the time are the GMC variants of these trucks. I will get to that subject matter later, though. For now, I wish to discuss this sketch. It was something I did while brainstorming ideas for how to tackle the project. The initial goal was to design four trucks (two for Chevrolet and two for GMC), and give them a more powerful, or revolutionary, design that can work with the traditional pickup truck configurations that have gone largely unchanged lately. For the Chevrolet trucks at least, I wanted to see if I could find a way to tie my design languages strongly with past Chevrolet trucks, such as the second-generation C/K trucks that were built from 1968 to 1972.

Since junior high school, I had gotten quite victimized by the whole fanfare of Chevrolet versus Ford. This fanfare, or fanboyism, ran until my early college years. It was not until I was finishing up college that I realized many errors in my life, mostly dealing with this fanfare, and the ugliness that had come about because of it (such as arguing with other fans on the internet forums, living under heavy bias and prejudice, and utter hate). Slowly, I worked to change myself. Taking some college courses in globalization and industrial history helped speed this up. I wish to dive into this subject matter a bit further later on. For now, I have covered some of the basics about how this project has started. Thank you for reading!