After many years as an intern for several car companies, including Mercedes and Audi, and also an active member of car forums, Hussein Al-Attar joined the BMW design team. As an exterior designer, All-Attar is part of a large team of talented designers that compete every year for the ultimate prize: seeing the fruit of their labor on the road.
In his short career at BMW Al-Attar has already made a difference: his headlights/taillights design is the one featured by the new BMW 4 Series Coupe.
MotorTrend sat down with the talented designer to learn what inspires him and the challenges he faced during the design process.
Headlights
The BMW 4 Series Coupe concept uses basically the same LED lighting technology found on the 6 Series lineup, but moves from rounded lines to an open hexagon. Al-Attar notes that connecting the light-emitting element to the grille — which is completely closed, by the way — is a new touch. It looks better in person than the LEDs on the current 3 Series sedan and is likely to be retained for the production BMW 4 Series coupe.
“We had a very clear picture in mind from the beginning,” Al-Attar says about designing the 4 Series Coupe concept’s lights. “At the end it was really fine-tuning and talking about where to put the line” connecting the lights to the grille, a few millimeters higher or lower.
Taillights
“If you look at the dynamic of graffiti lettering or in calligraphy, you can see that the thickness within the same letter is different and this gives it a very dynamic, very emotional appearance and this is what we tried here,” Al-Attar said. “With LED technology, we have the possibility to be very three-dimensional.”
BMW 4 Series Photo Gallery
