GM Styling's wonderful 1938 booklet, excerpts below, says it all on what this giant pioneered in industry:

"BEAUTY FOR EVERYONE"

The following images are from pages 16 thru 25 of the "MODES and MOTORS" booklet and allow one to visually conceptualize the flavor behind these new regions this original American renaissance man was first in industry to trailblaze. People today can now appreciate this history more than ever, especially since Harley Earl's products of yesteryear often look better than what's out there today. 

To break it all down quickly, here's another way to examine how Harley Earl truly revolutionized and fully organized these landmark areas, illustrated here, that went on to play no small part modernizing Detroit's mechanized auto world. Not much has changed after all these years concerning the innovative process of this hybrid form of "art, science and engineering" he applied to car architecture and other products of transportation and locomotion. It's also important to note that even general product designers, outside the world of transportation design, went on to feel the special effects of Earl's innovative design principles. For example, using clay and plaster model forms to build up the concept replicates, of any new products, went on to allow all sorts of different advantages to unfold for design/engineers.

Naturally, General Motors was the earliest manufacturer to adopt Mr. Earl's radical new math based principles of design. Doing so actually paved the way for this man to receive industry-wide recognition later on for inventing a whole new way of pre-engineering the car ahead of time, i.e., the Automobile Design Profession.

Sadly, GM went thru dramatic hard times over the last 30-odd years and that is why this large company lost so many great things. But even after this car company's devolving, it's still impossible to erase all the vivid evidence and scholarly examples of Harley Earl's central story of "Industrialized Art." Put another way, over the years since Mr. Earl died in 1969 - this valuable history on motor car designing being linked directly to "the modern art of industry" has been practically disemboweled in Detroit since no one knew how to follow up where Harley Earl left off. Simply put, GM did what most large corporations do...a horrendous job internalizing one man's life work: Mr. Earl's highly romantic car building ways.

This is why so many people in and around Detroit's auto world don't know much about Harley Earl and how he created an important "American Art Form" that is simply irreplaceable. Case in point, read a powerful maxim founded by Harley Earl (from page 28 below), that all big three U.S. auto makers entirely skipped using to design their products from 1975 thru the early 1990s:

"As in the case of the automobile, mechanical improvements, too, have contributed to improved appearance. In fact, it is rather an accepted principle that as a product is improved functionally, it tends to become better artistically."

To read more on Mr. E's good design periscope, click below