At the start of February, Frank Stephenson and PDE Grad Euan McPherson delivered a talk and day-long ‘Design sprint’ in the PDE studio. The talk was probably my favourite to date, and it was really powerful to break down the full career and hear insights from someone so influential in such a huge industry. Frank is super likeable and has a certain way of speaking that feels very American (I was surprised to find out he’s not actually from the US!) and at multiple points throughout the talk I found myself giggling at the way he phrased things. Here’s a few of the quotes I found most interesting (which I’ve very much paraphrased):

“Never fall in love with your work. Designers are only hired to improve things so if you think your work is perfect they’ll just hire someone else.”

“When you design for efficiency, often things will look good”

“Go with your gut, go on instinct. I don’t like taking too long to design things”

The last of these is obviously easy to say when your gut instinct has carried you to ‘Design Director’ at Ferrari and McLaren, however it's Stephenson’s experience and mastery of technical skills that allows him this freedom.

“Use nature as your inspiration. Architecture and design follows trends, but nature doesn’t make mistakes… Fish are incredible… birds are incredible! You know owls…? Owl design!”


Frank is big into ‘Biomimicry’; drawing inspiration from and mimicking nature within his work. This can be in search of efficiency, to aid aesthetic decisions and even as inspiration for new technologies. Overall, Stephenson seems to have a strong philosophy of designing quickly and freely; relying on instinct with decisions informed by concepts such as ‘design for efficiency’, ‘company design language’ and biomimicry. But most of all, it’s Frank’s ability to sketch and render that facilitates this fast paced and instinctive design.

Watching Frank and PDE grad Euan McPherson sketch was inspirational. The ease with which they are able to render such complex work and quality of line they are able to consistently produce is amazing. This power to put your ideas onto paper, to make them almost tangible is what Frank described as one of the most important tools within his industry.

So, if there’s one takeaway from Frank’s talk and ‘Design sprint’ the following day, it’s a desire to improve my sketching. I have no illusions that I’ll ever be able to render realistic Italian automotive sketches like Euan, that’s not my style (check out @euan.mcpherson on instagram and scroll down to see what I mean). But to create my own distinct style of sketching and more importantly to feel more confident with a pen as a tool is definitely a goal that these two days have focused me towards.

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5th Jan