The Story of Rich Boyd, Page 3

As Rich quickly learned, for an industrial designer to maintain employment in SoCal, one had to be versatile and flexible. A SoCal product design office. Design West needed a trans designer with minivan experience. A product manager inadvertently learned Rich had such experience after he had seriously underbid a modeling project with Mazda of North America. As project manager, Rich formed a small team to build a fullsize prototype from high-density foam. The model would be the basis for the very successful Mazda MPV minivan. This was under the direction of designer Tom Matano, another Art Center grad who later was appointed head of Mazda North America Design.

After completing the Mazda project, a couple of years passed with one year of employment at Fleetwood Enterprises, and temporary freelance jobs at some other SoCal product design offices, but Rich longed to get back to working with cars — any kind of cars. To keep from driving his wife Linda crazy, he began painting portraits of his favorite American automobiles (hot rods) in his spare time. Visual reference was acquired at local car shows. While at Fleetwood, a co-worker asked, “Why haven’t you ever published any of your renderings or designs?” Hmm, Why not? This thought eventually lead to an introduction to Geoff Carter, then-editor of Street Rodder magazine.

Thoughtfully, Geoff suggested the subject for an article in SRM’s upcoming 15th anniversary issue (May, ’87).
(continued on page 4)

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