Back to the Drawing Board

This nostalgic image, one of many released from Ford’s photo archives to celebrate the centenary of Ford of Britain in 2011, helps to remind us what life was like before computers. In those long-ago days before computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacture (CAM), teams of designers would sit at their desks and use traditional drawing tools – and their own ‘trained eye’ to create the iconic cars that characterised the 1950s.

This was the era of the Consul, Zephyr and Zodiac, models which established Ford as a design leader, and which underwent substantial changes through the 1950s and 1960s until the Mk IV Zephyr and Zodiac finally gave way to the Consul Granada in 1972.

Today, Ford is keen to emphasise that the computer hasn’t entirely replaced more traditional skills. The Ford Evos concept, for example, unveiled at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, is packed full of technology and ‘previews the design language for the next general of global Ford products’. Yet it was created using traditional design techniques and clay modelling, as well as state-of-the-art CAD/CAM.

[Photograph: Ford archive]