The iconic Ford GT, reimagined
While design director at Conjure, working closely with the Ford Performance team, I led the HMI design for Ford’s new GT.
Design lead • Project management • HMI design
The brief
Design the interior HMI, dashboard and central console, for Ford’s GT.
Approach
The Ford GT is made for both road and track use, so we had to design internal, interactive displays that were functional for both amateur drivers and seasoned racers.
With Ford’s goal to enter the new car in Le Mans, timings were tight, giving us just 18 months to design and develop the complete system.
The extreme secrecy of the project meant that we couldn’t work with the wider Ford team, so we assembled our own internal design system that accelerated the work exponentially, allowing us to hit our deadline.
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We designed an innovative, 4-mode driver display. Each mode was designed to have an individual feel.
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We reskinned the complete Sync Gen 3 centre console, comprising of 35,000 individual graphical assets.
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Motion design was hugely important on this project. We had to match the car’s dynamic personality, and create succinct, effective transition sequences.
Driver display
The driver’s display, including the speedometer and all of the telemetry data, was custom designed for the car, staying acutely on-brand, to highlight the different performance driving modes of the GT.
Four key driving modes underpin the core UX of the cluster: Normal, Wet, Track and Velocity. Each mode featured an innovative, collapsing tachometer, that would shrink to allow for information on demand (IoD) panels to be called up via input from the wheel.
Central console
Combined with the driver display, we had to reskin the complete Sync Gen 3 centre console, comprising of 35,000 individual graphical assets.
We created an entirely new design system, in-line with our creative vision for the internal HMI displays. We also created a streamlined process for producing all of the icons and symbols required for the central console, along with all of the different screen layouts.
Motion design
We spent a lot of time refining the motion design for both the centre console and the dash display. The challenge here was working with the limited capacity of the onboard GPU, but we overcame the technical challenges to produce motion design fitting for a car of this calibre.
Outcomes
Working to a tight deadline and quite strict technical limitations, the design and development team successfully delivered on time, meeting the client’s objectives.
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I led the design team to deliver a best-in-class HMI solution for one of the world’s leading automotive companies and an iconic GT car.
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We worked very closely with the Ford Performance Team, including weekly collaborative design sessions. This was a strategic approach to speed up design decisions, with the tight timeline of the project.