Porsche E-Homage : Rudraksh Banerjie

As a “Porsche Guy”, Rudraksh has always been intimidated to attempt a Porsche project as he felt he wasn’t ready to do justice to the brand. However, the ich to do one never died. After his masters, he decided to take up the challenge. He wanted to do something that was inspired by the legendary Carrera GT and the 918 spyder and with that thought, He started to sketch some roofless Porsches.

At the start of any project, the design philosophy is always the fundamental point – the message that must be expressed. If you do some research into the history of design of any product, a recurring theme is that nostalgia never goes out of fashion. It seems that as generations of designers pass through the system, they always bring back the feelings of the products that they grew up with and got influenced by. It’s a cyclical process of reinterpretation of our influences, and as designers you experience this phenomenon quite vividly. You would be lying to yourself if you said that you didn’t at some point imagine what a modern version of your favourite iconic car would look like – and this fact gets proven by the number of views such attempts get on social media. However, it’s always a tricky task as a designer to venture into this territory because you risk seeming unoriginal.

Before you reinterpret something, it’s imperative to analyze the object of reference and for Rudraksh the way to do that was to sketch some Porches from scratch. This type of activity allowed him to simulate being in the shoes of the legends that penned these masterpieces and get some sort of an idea as to what he must do to do justice to my project. The idea was to define the iconic Porsche silhouette within my package and work on these pure sensual volumes, accentuated with hyper modern graphics. Take away everything that was unnecessary to arrive to a point where you can’t take away anything more. Simplicity is timeless.

To simulate a fast-paced modern-day project, he set his deadlines and decided to work with 3D in parallel to 2D. Bounce back and forth and do rapid iterations to perform a process of elimination. Execute – analyze – is it bad? – delete – Is it good? – keep – and then continue to evolve. Deadlines are important because as creatives are never satisfied. If it was up to creatives, nothing would ever be finished because there is always room for improvement. You wake up the next day improved and what you did yesterday doesn’t meet your standards anymore. At certain moments, he had to freeze the step he was in, and proceed to the next one in order to make tangible progress towards finishing the project. Better finished than perfect.

“This project now is almost 2 years old and there is a long list of things I would improve and do differently. However, I still feel that it holds up. It played a major role in my growth and for that reason, holds high personal value for me.” says Rudraksh Banerjie.

About Designer

Rudraksh Banerjie is a Transportation Designer from New Delhi, India. He did his bachelors in Transportation Design from Istituto Europeo di Design in Turin, Italy. After a tough period of almost 2 years where he couldn’t find any employment he went back to Turin to do masters. He is currently a designer at Manifattura Automobili Torino since 2019. For more of his work you can follow him on Behance.