Esquire's got a piece up on J Mays, Ford's chief designer and the man behind the retrofuturistic Thunderbird, as well as the concepts that led to VW's new Beetle and the Audi TT. The article isn't a profile so much as a Sun-Tzu-like summation of Mays' philosophies, like the following:

- Believe it or not, there's an art to plowing a field. My father had an exact way he wanted it done, a laser-straight line over the length of the field. I just had to train my eye. If you lay out the first line wrong, then all the other lines that you disc will turn out crooked. There was a precision in those fields that I took into automotive design.

- The dirty little secret about simplicity is that it's really hard to do.

- If you go into a person's house and look at his surroundings, you'll see exactly who he is. If you look at the same person in his car, you'll see who he wants to be.

Check it out here.