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Video: Jaguar's Julian Thomson on the importance of design values

Jaguar's Head of Advanced Design, Julian Thomson, appeared at this month's PSFK Conference in London giving a talk on design values. Thomson's talk, ‘Concepting Dreams, Making Reality Happen', dealt with questions of creating a design story as well as how Jaguar uses the value of its heritage while keeping things original and new. Thomson – the man behind the 2010 C-X75 and the recently revealed F-Type – said, "You can't get a good design story if you don't look at your heritage, where you came from, where your values came from." He went on to discuss the ‘sad years of Jaguar', from around 1968 to 2004 where Jaguar was too timid to develop and "essentially made the same-looking car." He put this down to a reluctance on Jaguar's part to move too far away from its successful models and, quite interestingly, because "not only did we start doing market research, we started asking Americans what they wanted." Watch the full video on the left.

Driven: Kia Picanto

The first-generation Kia Picanto was one of the cars that helped promote Kia from the lower half of the second-division to somewhere near the playoff places. Its combination of great value, five-door practicality and vaguely cutesy - if thoroughly unremarkable - design found it many a home on the driveway of those looking for an A-segment hatchback. The second-generation model is playing a rather tougher ballgame.

The most beautiful cars at Pebble Beach and Monterey week 2013

It’s said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there are some car designs that just work brilliantly – ones that few will ever argue are anything other than beautiful. These are two dozen such cars – we reckon all are landmark designs that will always look nothing less than stunning.