Design Direction

As Ian Callum Leaves Jaguar After A 20-year Stint As Its Design Head, We Look Back At What Made Him One Of The Most Influential Car Designers Of Our Times

- Tuhin Guha

“Paralleling Ian Callum’s Career To Jaguar’s Resurgence Is Telling Only Half The Story”

Design creates order out of chaos, but chaos is often required to simply be creative”, reads the quote from Ian Callum’s new website’s homepage. It’s the only thing you can see there and quite a perfect synthesis of what his 20-year stint as design director of Jaguar did for the company.

It was 1999, and Jaguar was only a shade of its former glory. The company from its E-Type and XJ Coupe glory days, had been reduced to selling rebadged Fords with a tacked-on premium-badge. In no part was this helped by years that the company spent under British Leyland. And we know what that company’s bureaucracy and mismanagement did for the British car industry.

Ian Callum came into this chaos, and as a lifelong Jaguar fan, decided to go back to the absolute core of the brand’s values. He says of successfully designing new Jaguars, “My point of judgment is always: what would Sir William Lyons think of this? And I honestly think he’d approve, hugely.”

But paralleling Ian Callum’s career to Jaguar’s resurgence would be telling only half the story. The Scotsman studied at Glasgow School of Art before taking a Masters in Vehicle Design at the Royal College of Art in London. He then worked at Ford for a good 12 years from 1979 before switching to Tom Walkinshaw Racing, a racing outfit and engineering firm which closely associated itself with Jaguar in the 1980s. He came into his own at TWR, designing cars for Aston Martin, Volvo, Ford and Nissan.