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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.

Spada, The long story of a long tail is Waft's latest book

Spada, The long story of a short tail is the new book from Waft publishing. As the title suggests, this latest project from the creators of Masters of Modern Car Design charts the remarkably prolific career of Italian car designer Ercole Spada. From the legendary Zagato-era Aston Martin DB4 and Alfa Romeo TZ1 that established his trademark cropped tail, to the 2008 Codatronca supercar that bore his name, via the 1980s BMW 5 and 7 Series, this 304-page hardback covers them all in fine detail.

French Revolution: a tragic tale of three car brands

Once upon a time, in France, there were three brothers, three very different characters, but whose futures were inextricably linked. The youngest brother was Citroen. He was brilliant and he was good-looking.