Blog
Thoughts on AI-native design, product workflows, and the future of industrial design.
The window keeps shrinking, and the people inside keep saying nothing
The biggest piece of glass on the side of a car has been quietly shrinking for 25 years as the beltline rose 'up and up and up and up' — and where the glass runs out, the studio glues on a black plastic panel shaped like a window. The reveal render shows the planted exterior. It never shows the view from the back seat — which IIHS now measures as up to 58% worse than in 1997.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The face you recognise the car by isn't where the light comes from
The thin glowing line you'd call the headlight is the daytime running light, mounted high for the design. The lamp that actually lights the road has been banished low into the bumper. The reveal render shows the face glowing in the dark; it can't show that the light comes from somewhere you're not looking, or that in 2026 that light is the most-complained-about thing on the road.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The vents on your car breathe nothing — and the buyer is starting to notice
The most performance-coded surfaces on a modern car — the fender gills, hood scoops, quad outlets and bumper slashes — are increasingly sealed plastic over solid sheet metal. They move no air. As of late 2025 the enthusiast press is naming the cars by model year, and the design decision meant to signal performance is now the thing that gets a car mocked the moment its cover is blown.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The seat your studio calls "leather" — that a court just ruled isn't
The most-touched surface in the cabin is sold as warm, hand-stitched "leather" — but it is usually polyurethane plastic, and on 4 July 2025 a German court ruled that calling a non-animal material "leather" is illegal. The seat facing is now a chemistry, a durability liability, a supply-chain bet and a regulated environmental claim at once — and the hero render only ever shows it new.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The only round thing on the car the studio doesn't get to draw
A car company spends two years arguing over a wheel spoke, then bolts that wheel to the largest curved surface on the car nobody in the studio is allowed to design — and stamps a rival supplier name across it. The tyre is the biggest visible decision the design chief outsources, and a regulator, a toxicologist and an NVH engineer all now get a vote on it before the brand does.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The fender you're not allowed to copy
Register a body panel's appearance as protected design IP and you become the only legal source for the part a crash always needs. GM and Ford have built a business on it; the US Federal Circuit just made those patents easier to break (LKQ v. GM, 21 May 2024) while the EU opened must-match parts with its new repair clause (11 Oct 2024). The shape of a fender is now also a question of who is legally allowed to make the next one — and it's decided on a render of a car that has never been hit.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The most expensive letters on the car are the ones nobody in the studio designed
Volvo spent its centenary commissioning a typeface whose whole job is to keep your eyes on the road - quietly proving that the font on every other dashboard arrived by accident. The in-car typeface is the most-read, least-designed surface in the car: at once the brand's loudest voice and a legibility-while-driving safety system, owned by no one. The render shows the letters gorgeous and standing still, the one state in which a typeface does no reading work at all.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The roof you chose for the view is the one engineered to come apart over your head
The glass-roof render only ever shows one thing the glass never does: hold still and stay whole. The same pane sold as openness is, on thousands of cars, the kind that detonates without warning — because the lightest, cheapest glass for the job is also the kind that fails all at once. There is a glass that doesn't spray the cabin; it costs more, so most of the industry quietly ships the other one.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The grille has no job left — so the studio gave it the hardest one on the car
The EV deleted the grille's job and kept the face — then made it a 942-pixel light show. In most markets it's illegal to light it while driving. The render shows it lit; the road shows it dark.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The tailgate can't decide how to open — and the studio shipped all four answers
Split or single. Powered or pulled. Kicked open with a foot or pressed with a thumb. In 2026 the industry shipped four contradictory answers — and one big maker just deleted the most-advertised one.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The car that changes its mind about what colour it is
BMW just cleared a body panel that changes colour on a slider. The brand hero hue — the most-protected studio decision — is now a setting in a menu, and nobody has decided what that means.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The seat that lies down on the job
The most-advertised feature in the Chinese luxury EV is the one the crash dummy can't sit in. China's MIIT just drew a line through the recline angle the whole segment competes on.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The car that fakes its own voice
Your new electric car is legally required to make a noise it can't make — so designers are deleting the exhaust, faking the tips, or piping a 126-decibel synthesized roar through the speakers, and…
By Mary
The most beautiful thing designers did to the side of the car is now banned for trapping people inside it.
The flush door handle was the cleanest line in car design — until people died because they couldn't open it. China just wrote the mechanical handle back into law and the US is investigating 179,000…
By Mary
The clay is dead. So why is every studio still paying six figures to sculpt one?
Honda quietly demoted the most sacred object in car design to a verification tool — and the people who sculpt clay say the digital-first camp is confusing form-finding with taste. The real fight…
By Mary
The pedal you can't feel
In 2026 the electric car quietly broke the oldest rule of driving: lifting off the accelerator now stops the car, and on many EVs the brake lights stay dark while you slow down hard. China's GB…
By Mary
The key that became a subscription
Carmakers are deleting the physical key in 2026 and handing access to your phone, then charging $15 a month to keep the door unlocking. The most personal object of ownership is being repossessed and…
By Mary
The screen that ages the car
The most photographed decision in a car interior is the one that destroys its resale value fastest.
By Mary
The Pillar That Gets Thicker Every Time It Has to Save Your Life
*The A-pillar is the one structural member a designer cannot move, cannot hide, and cannot thin — and the regulations of 2025 just told it to get fatter while the same designer is being asked to make
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The wheel that has to be ugly to be honest
*The face of the wheel — for a century the single most styled, most aspirational object a customer pointed at in the showroom — has quietly become the place where a car loses or keeps a quarter of its
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The slot that decides where your face gets cold
*For ninety years the air vent was the one cabin object nobody argued about — a louvred rectangle you nudged with a thumb. In 2026 it has quietly become one of the most contested square centimetres on
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The colour of the dark: when the cabin glow became a brand's signature
*A car you cannot see in a night-time car park still announces itself — by the colour leaking out of its windows. Ambient interior lighting stopped being decoration the day a designer realised the glo
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The needle that survived eleven generations and lost to a screen
*For sixty years the round dial behind the wheel was the one instrument a driver read without thinking — a sweep of a needle that meant speed, revs, life. In 2024 Porsche took the analog tachometer ou
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The smallest square inch carries the whole brand — and four forces are fighting over it
*The badge is the only part of a car that exists purely to mean something. It hauls no load, moves no air, seats no one. So when the badge stops being a stamped chrome ornament and becomes a regulated
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The flap that one rented garage decided for everyone
*A four-centimetre door on the side of the car is the last exterior surface nobody styled on purpose — and now it is the most consequential placement decision an EV studio makes, because it is the one
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The shine that became a liability: when brightwork stopped being a finish and became a decision
*For a century, chrome was the cheapest way to say "premium." A thin bright line traced the glasshouse, capped the grille, edged the wheel — and the eye read it as care. Then the line stopped being fr
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The half-second of theatre before the engine even starts
*A shopper drops into the driver's seat, reaches back, and pulls the door shut. Whatever happens in the next half-second — a hollow tin clap or a low, damped thud that settles and stops — decides what
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The door doesn't open — it makes an argument
*For a century, how a door swung was decided by a hinge and a parking space. Then the centre pillar became optional, the latch moved into the floor, and the question of which way the door opens turned
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The empty box behind the nose: what a frunk really decides
*The front trunk was sold as free space — proof the engine was gone. In 2026 it is being priced, deleted, and re-engineered down a trim wall, because the volume behind the nose was never free. It is t
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The roof went to glass and took the shade with it
*The fixed panoramic roof was sold as openness — sky in the cabin, lightness on the scale, a lower centre of gravity. What it quietly deleted was the metal, the sunshade and the off-switch. Now the la
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The licence plate is a rectangle the law put on your car — and design has run out of places to hide it
*A government-spec billboard, roughly 520 by 110 millimetres in Europe, must live on the most photographed surface of the vehicle. Designers spent a century styling around it, EVs deleted the grille t
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Window That Stopped Looking Backward
*For a century the rear window was the one piece of glass a car could not do without — the legally and intuitively obvious way to see what was behind you. Then a 2.5-megapixel camera the size of a sha
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The stalk nobody noticed until it was gone
*A turn-signal lever is the cheapest, oldest, least glamorous part of a car — and the one piece of hardware whose deletion a brand has now publicly priced, reversed, and apologised for. The steering c
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The wheel stopped being round, and nobody agreed on what it should be instead
*The steering wheel is the one object in the car the driver touches for every second of every drive — and in 2026 it is being redrawn into a yoke, a squircle, or held defiantly round, often on the ver
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The bar that stopped meaning anything
*A horizontal line of red light once told you, at a glance and from forty metres, exactly which brand was braking in front of you. A decade later the same line tells you almost nothing — every back en
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The flap the glass roof left nowhere to mount
There is one piece of a car's interior that has survived, almost unchanged, every revolution the cabin has been through. The instrument binnacle became a screen. The shifter became a stalk, then a but
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The last unstyled thing on the front of the car
*For a hundred years the wiper was the one part a designer was allowed to ignore — a black rubber arm bolted across the glass, drawn by no studio, defended by no brand. Now four teams want it gone, th
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Car Stopped Being A Shape. It Became A Verb.
*A McLaren parked, a McLaren cruising, a McLaren braking at the apex are three different silhouettes — and a studio now has to make all three read as the same car. Active aero turned the body from an
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The cabin has too many designers — and the org chart became the design decision
*A modern interior is one experience stitched from nine disciplines — UI, UX, physical HMI, lighting, sound, touch, materials, digital modelling, user testing. It is still authored by nine teams with
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Material That Refuses to Forgive: How Choosing Bare Stainless Turned Every Tolerance Into a Public Verdict
*A painted body is a body with an alibi. Primer, base coat, clear coat — three layers whose quiet second job is to swallow the millimetre a stamping press missed, soften the shadow a panel gap throws,
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Year the Design Chiefs Moved — And Five Brands' Visual Futures Moved With Them
*In the space of nine months, the people who decide what Mercedes, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Jaguar Land Rover and McLaren will look like for the next decade all changed chairs. The cars on those compan
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Flush Handle Looked Like the Future — Until Someone Had to Open the Door
*For a decade the door handle was a problem to be erased. Tesla buried it in 2012, every EV studio followed, and the smooth flank became shorthand for "advanced." Then the bill arrived. On 23 December
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The car forgot where Drive lives
*For a century the gear selector was the one control no one had to learn — a lever between the seats, P-R-N-D-L printed beside it, a notch your hand found without looking. Now it is a column stalk, a
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Skid Plate That Will Never Touch a Rock
*Cladding, beadlock-look wheels, recovery hooks, a stamped-steel bash plate slung under the nose — an entire grammar of dirt, sold to a buyer who will spend the car's whole life on tarmac. This isn't
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Colour On Your Next Car Was Chosen Three Years Ago, By People You Never Met, From A Forecast Nobody Can Check
*A studio does not pick a finish at launch. It pre-commits one — years earlier, against a trend forecast it neither owns nor can verify — and then waits to find out whether the guess was right. The pa
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Button Comes Back: When the Hardest Control to Design Is the One You Can Feel
*A safety body and a Ferrari just told the whole industry the same thing — the touchscreen took something away, and now the decision is which knobs earn the right to stay. This is Design Intelligence
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Body Stops Being Painted
*A car's colour was the one decision a studio made once, at the factory, and never again. E Ink's Prism film — now cleared for series production on a BMW bonnet — turns the body into a low-bandwidth d
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Tail-Lamp Stopped Being a Shape and Became a Decision That Never Ends
*For a century a light signature was a fixed thing: you drew the graphic once, tooled the lens, and the car wore it for its whole life. Segmented OLED ends that. The Audi A6 e-tron carries ten rear pa
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
Selling the Past as the Future: When a Revived Silhouette Borrows Trust the Studio Never Earned
*A wave of reissued nameplates — the Renault 5, the VW ID. Buzz, the Fiat 500e — is betting that a beloved shape is the cheapest equity money can buy. It is also the most dangerous. The line between a
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
Two Ovals and a Bar: How Rivian Built a Whole Identity Out of the Simplest Thing in the Room
*A front graphic that a clay model can't justify and a screen can't sell — and the lesson for any studio that has ever talked itself out of its best idea.* There is a particular kind of design decisi
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Model That Outlives the Car Is Running the One Test Your Studio Never Did
The hard facts, each web-verified with a real publication date.
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Seat Stops Facing Forward
*For a century the seat was a fixed forward throne, bolted at an angle the crash engineer chose and the designer inherited. Now the body inside it wants to recline to 126 degrees, swivel to face the c
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The wing mirror was the last thing nobody dared delete
*For a hundred years the side mirror was a fixed fact of the silhouette — a chrome blister the designer styled around but could never remove. Now a camera the size of a thumbnail wants its job, the la
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Grille You Can Hear
*When the engine goes silent, the sound a car makes stops being a by-product of combustion and becomes a designed object — authored on purpose, signed by a named composer, and carrying the same brand-
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
Volvo built a cabin around one screen — and the real design work is everything they refused to put behind it
*The ES90 makes the dashboard's physical form almost incidental. Nearly every function now lives behind a 14.5-inch sheet of glass. Which means the few surfaces left — the wood, the wheel, the handful
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Number That Designed The Car: How A Single Cd Figure Quietly Took Over The Front, The Mirrors And The Wheels
*A drag coefficient is one number, printed in a spec sheet, smaller than a postage stamp. It is now the most powerful person in the studio. When the Cd becomes a headline trophy, the brief stops being
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
The Windshield Is the Last Clear Surface — and Now It's a Design Decision
*For a century the windscreen was the one part of the car a designer was forbidden to touch — glass you saw the world through, nothing more. In 2026 that rule died quietly. BMW's Panoramic Vision ligh
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
A Phone Company Made a Car the Design Press Couldn't Dismiss — Because It Imported a Discipline, Not a Heritage
For a century, the legacy automotive industry has guarded one moat it believed no outsider could cross: *we have always made cars.* The argument was never explicit, but it ran underneath every…
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
For a Hundred Years the Wheel Told the Driver the Truth. The Link Just Broke — and Now Someone Has to Design the Feel
Every other surface on a car is something the driver *looks at*. The steering wheel is the one surface the driver *holds* — the single place where the machine talks back through the hands,…
By Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence
China Designs Cars Three Times Faster Than the West — and It Has Nothing to Do With Factories
The uncomfortable truth every Western design studio is quietly living with — and the one lever that actually closes the gap.
By Mary
AI Is the Next Clay — But It Starts in 2D
Depix introduces Vibe Design — a new framework for AI-native product design that shifts maturity upstream, reduces costly 3D iteration, and helps teams make better creative decisions before committing resources.
By Christian Braun
Your best designers are still sketching. Your competitors are running the slot machine.
Most design teams use AI like a search engine. The ones pulling ahead treat it like a slot machine — and they're right to.
By Philip Lunn
0.0233 seconds.
The closest Indy 500 in 110 years. And a homage, in carbon and pixels, from one of our own.
By Philip Lunn
Stop upskilling. Start unlearning.
Every enterprise rolling out AI is asking the wrong question. The bottleneck was never the tool. It's the chair people have been sitting in for fifteen years.
By Philip Lunn
Your New Design Team Is a Network of Agents
The teams shipping the most interesting work right now aren't asking which model is best — they're asking which team of agents is best. And like any good team, the magic isn't in any individual member. It's in the orchestrator that knows when to call on whom.
KeyShot vs Vizcom vs Depix: Which AI Visualization Tool Is Best for Product Design Teams?
Design teams today don't just need better renders. They need faster decisions, clearer communication, and a more efficient way to turn early ideas into visuals that people can understand immediately.
Develop3D Live 2026: The Real Challenge Is Not Generating Digital Output. It Is Getting to Physical Outcomes.
A phrase surfaced at Develop3D Live 2026 that framed the whole day: bits to atoms. AI can generate plausible outputs faster than ever — the harder question is whether those outputs can survive contact with reality.
By Derek Cicero
The CMF Process Is Broken. We're Fixing It.
Getting color, material, and finish right is one of the most time-consuming parts of product development — and one of the most important. We built Depix CMF Vision to change that.
Depix Featured in Develop3D Magazine — and Speaking at Develop3D Live
Depix is featured in the February/March 2026 edition of Develop3D Magazine with a two-page spread on our AI-driven visualization technology. We're also a featured speaker at Develop3D Live on March 25th in Coventry.
What If the Charger Is the Presentation Device?
This didn't start with technology. It started with desire. What if a daily object could create the same feeling as a luxury artifact? A portable 3-in-1 charger with an integrated 4K projector.
Form Follows Intent™
Why 'form follows function' no longer fits the AI era — and how Form Follows Intent™ reframes the challenge of design for product teams and AI systems alike.
By Christian Braun
Design by Intent™: PreCAD Changes the Equation
The traditional product design workflow buries designers under months of decisions before a single line of CAD is drawn. PreCAD collapses that entirely — compressing ideation, decision-making, and visualization into minutes.
What AI-Native Product Design Actually Means
Most AI design tools bolt intelligence onto existing workflows. We built Depix differently — from the ground up, around the idea that a machine should handle the tedious parts so you can focus on intent.
From Concept to 3D Model in Under Five Minutes
A walk-through of how Depix compresses what used to take days into a single, focused session — from first idea to production-ready 3D output.
Depix is SOC2 Type 2 Certified.
Enterprise design teams need more than great tools — they need tools they can trust. We completed our SOC2 Type II audit in January 2026.
Building in Montreal: Why Location Still Matters
We chose Montreal deliberately. The city's engineering talent, design culture, and cross-industry density give Depix an edge that's hard to replicate elsewhere.
From iPad Sketch to Rendered Reality in Depix Design Lab: Maserati's Klaus Busse at MDC Milan
At the Mobility Design Conference in Milan, Maserati Head of Design Klaus Busse sketched a Maserati on an iPad — and we brought it to life in seconds using Depix Design Lab.
By Philip Lunn
Autodesk Automotive Innovation Forum 2025
Depix and Ideenkultivierung will be showcasing our latest software plugin for Autodesk VRED along with Design Lab at the Automotive Innovation Forum 2025, May 13–14 in Darmstadt, Germany.
By Philip Lunn
Lamborghini's Mitja Borkert Brings a Sketch to Life at MDC Milan
At the Mobility Design Conference in Milan, Lamborghini Design Director Mitja Borkert sketched a concept live — and we transformed it into photorealistic renders in real time using Depix Design Lab.
By Philip Lunn
Unlock Your Brand's Visual DNA: How to Fine-Tune Depix's AI for Consistent, On-Brand Designs
Capture the essence of your brand's visual identity and apply it effortlessly to new designs. A step-by-step guide to fine-tuning Depix's AI on your own images.
Bridging the Gap: How Generative AI Integrates 2D, 3D, and Physical Workflows
In car design, the creative process often feels like a juggling act between sketching, 3D modeling, and clay sculpting. Depix's generative AI unifies these stages into a single, fluid process.
The Convergence of AI and 3D: A New Era in Digital Image Creation
The digital art world is experiencing a fundamental transformation as AI image generation merges with traditional 3D modeling and rendering workflows, creating powerful new hybrid approaches.
From Clay to Reality: Exploring Design Lab's Style Drive Technology
Style Drive performs 'visual translation' — preserving a clay model's exact form and proportions while adopting real-world materials, lighting, and environmental depth.
Cor Seenstra Reimagines the Chevrolet Bel Air
Cor Seenstra, on CarDesignTV, tackled an ambitious challenge: reimagining the Chevrolet Bel Air for the modern era using Depix's AI-powered rendering platform.