Mixing colours for new models
By Kenji Hall | Photos by Kohei Take
It's a bright, cloudless morning, the kind of day when you have to squint to see anything in the harsh glare. In Megumi Suzuki's mind, this is ideal for a tutorial in the complexities of color. At Lexus' sprawling design centre in central Japan, Suzuki has gathered more than a dozen thin aluminum panels the size of a paperback novel. Each is coated in a different hue of red paint.
Most people would have a hard time telling the red panels apart. To Suzuki, though, they couldn't be more different. One shines with specks of metal as small grains of sand. There's also a red that's too bright and flat, and a crimson that is not bright enough.
Suzuki picks one up and holds it flat so it reflects the sunlight. It's a candy-apple hue, but as she bends the panel, it becomes darker, like carmine. This is the new Lexus red - and you've seen it on the Lexus RC.
"We wanted a color that could be both bright and dark, depending on the viewing angle," says Suzuki, a member of Lexus' color design team. "That contrast helps to highlight the car's curves and angles."
Developing the RC's red hue was a complex undertaking that spanned more than two years. It was always Suzuki's first choice. But what shade of red? Could it appeal to both men and women? And how would she ensure the new color reinforced the brand's luxury lineage? Those questions nagged at Suzuki almost until the moment Lexus debuted the new color on a freshly painted Lexus RC coupe.
Such is life for Lexus color designers such as Suzuki and her colleagues, shown below. They refuse to use off-the-shelf colors, and there are no shortcuts: a designer's decision comes only after going through hundreds of samples. "I looked at so many shades of red paint that I couldn't see straight," Suzuki says.
Fortunately, Lexus equips their color experts with the tools needed to make tough decisions. Take the Color Study Area, which is off-limits to most outsiders.
A low-slung building with floor-to-ceiling windows faces a narrow strip of asphalt that is bordered on one side by a tall evergreen hedge. Embedded in the asphalt are two remote-controlled turntables for viewing vehicles from any angle. This is how a designer gets a feel for how a color will appear on a car's metal body.
On this day, a white NX, the new angular crossover SUV, sits in the sunlight in the Color Study Area. Momoko Okamoto, who came up with the Eminent White Pearl color for the NX's global debut, is scrutinizing the exterior.
When Okamoto first sat down with NX designers, before she had a key production color in mind, they told her the car's shape would resemble a bullet. "They were probably hoping I would choose silver or gunmetal grey, which naturally accentuates a car's contours," she explains.
Okamoto had other ideas, though, and months later had a eureka moment: she remembered the wintry landscape back home in Sapporo, on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. "In sunlight snow is brilliant, but in the shade it is muted," she says. And so she chose a new white - but a tone inspired by Hokkaido's snowy hills.
To get the desired effect, her team relied on a technology known as sonic painting. The usual automotive paint job is made up of three layers: a base to prevent rust, the color coat, and a clear coat for protection against wear. Sonic technology allowed Lexus to develop an NX paint job with five layers.
Color would come from three of them - a dense, ultrathin top layer of white with microscopic mica chips (which reflect and let light through), a pearl mica middle layer, and a thick layer of white below.
The only way to know if the color would work, though, would be to look at a full-scale mock up, so Okamato's team had in-house sculptors carve an NX out of clay. Lexus painters sprayed half of it in the new white and the other half in the current white. Then Okamoto put the mock up on the Color Study Area turntable, and she and other designers stared at it for hours.
"For the first time, everybody in the NX design team was nodding in approval," recalls Okamoto. "I was thinking, "Yes!""
That's when engineers stepped in to begin figuring out how to reproduce the paint job in the factory. It's tricky to spray an even coat of paint onto the angled parts of a car body. Imagine doing it perfectly with multiple layers of paint and clear coating that, combined, are no thicker than the strand of a human hair - and repeating that feat every few minutes. One micron too thick or thin can cause a blemish that most people might miss but that Lexus color evaluators would flag.
During any Lexus model's initial production run, it's not uncommon for some cars to be pulled from the assembly line and manually resprayed by one of the factory's paint takumi (artisans). That happened with the RC's new red, says Suzuki.
A bottom coat of silver acts like a mirror beneath a semi-translucent red layer, which is packed with tiny aluminum flakes. Using two different colors in a paint job is rare; it can also exaggerate the smallest imperfections - but done right, with massive attention to detail, it's incredibly striking.
But that's what it takes to come up with colors no one has seen before. "What we do isn't glamorous," says division head Kitamura. "But no other company goes this far or can beat us on quality."
Cheers!
All Lexus
The above is featured content that appeared in Beyond by Lexus, but it was so interesting I decided it had to be reproduced for my awesome readers. Parts of this article has been edited to incorporate updated information.
By Kenji Hall | Photos by Kohei Take
It's a bright, cloudless morning, the kind of day when you have to squint to see anything in the harsh glare. In Megumi Suzuki's mind, this is ideal for a tutorial in the complexities of color. At Lexus' sprawling design centre in central Japan, Suzuki has gathered more than a dozen thin aluminum panels the size of a paperback novel. Each is coated in a different hue of red paint.
Most people would have a hard time telling the red panels apart. To Suzuki, though, they couldn't be more different. One shines with specks of metal as small grains of sand. There's also a red that's too bright and flat, and a crimson that is not bright enough.
Suzuki picks one up and holds it flat so it reflects the sunlight. It's a candy-apple hue, but as she bends the panel, it becomes darker, like carmine. This is the new Lexus red - and you've seen it on the Lexus RC.
"We wanted a color that could be both bright and dark, depending on the viewing angle," says Suzuki, a member of Lexus' color design team. "That contrast helps to highlight the car's curves and angles."
Developing the RC's red hue was a complex undertaking that spanned more than two years. It was always Suzuki's first choice. But what shade of red? Could it appeal to both men and women? And how would she ensure the new color reinforced the brand's luxury lineage? Those questions nagged at Suzuki almost until the moment Lexus debuted the new color on a freshly painted Lexus RC coupe.
Such is life for Lexus color designers such as Suzuki and her colleagues, shown below. They refuse to use off-the-shelf colors, and there are no shortcuts: a designer's decision comes only after going through hundreds of samples. "I looked at so many shades of red paint that I couldn't see straight," Suzuki says.
Fortunately, Lexus equips their color experts with the tools needed to make tough decisions. Take the Color Study Area, which is off-limits to most outsiders.
A low-slung building with floor-to-ceiling windows faces a narrow strip of asphalt that is bordered on one side by a tall evergreen hedge. Embedded in the asphalt are two remote-controlled turntables for viewing vehicles from any angle. This is how a designer gets a feel for how a color will appear on a car's metal body.
On this day, a white NX, the new angular crossover SUV, sits in the sunlight in the Color Study Area. Momoko Okamoto, who came up with the Eminent White Pearl color for the NX's global debut, is scrutinizing the exterior.
When Okamoto first sat down with NX designers, before she had a key production color in mind, they told her the car's shape would resemble a bullet. "They were probably hoping I would choose silver or gunmetal grey, which naturally accentuates a car's contours," she explains.
Okamoto had other ideas, though, and months later had a eureka moment: she remembered the wintry landscape back home in Sapporo, on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. "In sunlight snow is brilliant, but in the shade it is muted," she says. And so she chose a new white - but a tone inspired by Hokkaido's snowy hills.
To get the desired effect, her team relied on a technology known as sonic painting. The usual automotive paint job is made up of three layers: a base to prevent rust, the color coat, and a clear coat for protection against wear. Sonic technology allowed Lexus to develop an NX paint job with five layers.
Color would come from three of them - a dense, ultrathin top layer of white with microscopic mica chips (which reflect and let light through), a pearl mica middle layer, and a thick layer of white below.
The only way to know if the color would work, though, would be to look at a full-scale mock up, so Okamato's team had in-house sculptors carve an NX out of clay. Lexus painters sprayed half of it in the new white and the other half in the current white. Then Okamoto put the mock up on the Color Study Area turntable, and she and other designers stared at it for hours.
"For the first time, everybody in the NX design team was nodding in approval," recalls Okamoto. "I was thinking, "Yes!""
That's when engineers stepped in to begin figuring out how to reproduce the paint job in the factory. It's tricky to spray an even coat of paint onto the angled parts of a car body. Imagine doing it perfectly with multiple layers of paint and clear coating that, combined, are no thicker than the strand of a human hair - and repeating that feat every few minutes. One micron too thick or thin can cause a blemish that most people might miss but that Lexus color evaluators would flag.
During any Lexus model's initial production run, it's not uncommon for some cars to be pulled from the assembly line and manually resprayed by one of the factory's paint takumi (artisans). That happened with the RC's new red, says Suzuki.
A bottom coat of silver acts like a mirror beneath a semi-translucent red layer, which is packed with tiny aluminum flakes. Using two different colors in a paint job is rare; it can also exaggerate the smallest imperfections - but done right, with massive attention to detail, it's incredibly striking.
But that's what it takes to come up with colors no one has seen before. "What we do isn't glamorous," says division head Kitamura. "But no other company goes this far or can beat us on quality."
Cheers!
All Lexus
The above is featured content that appeared in Beyond by Lexus, but it was so interesting I decided it had to be reproduced for my awesome readers. Parts of this article has been edited to incorporate updated information.
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