Ege Argüden

Ege Argüden is a Turkish-American automotive and industrial designer — an exterior designer at Ford Motor Company for nearly a decade, where his work included the seventh-generation Mustang, the Bronco Sport, and the Maverick, and where he led the design of the Explorer Timberline. Before any of that he was a prodigy: a twelve-year-old intern at a Turkish shipyard, a sixteen-year-old intern at Volkswagen's Potsdam design center, and an Art Center graduate whose final-year Porsche 901 concept was published as a vision of the marque's future.^[1][2]

The sketchbook

Argüden was born in the United States to Turkish parents and moved back to Istanbul a few months later. His vocation arrived early and precisely: at six, watching cars in traffic, he asked his father how they were built. Told that cars begin as designers' sketches, he decided on the spot that this would be his job — he already loved drawing, and now drawing had an object. With nobody around him who knew the field, he taught himself from the internet, from books his father brought home, and by copying the work of established designers; by twelve he had a portfolio of car drawings.^[3][4]

His father showed the sketchbook to Ekber Onuk, chairman of the Yonca-Onuk shipyard in Istanbul — a yard that also ran automotive design projects. Onuk invited the twelve-year-old to spend his weekends there, where he learned from Turkish designers Eralp Noyan and Gökhan Akış. It was, in effect, an apprenticeship before secondary school.^[5]

Germany

The pattern repeated at sixteen. Murat Günak — former head of design for the Volkswagen Group — visited Yonca-Onuk, saw Argüden's work, and invited him to the Volkswagen Design Center in Potsdam. Argüden spent the summers of 2006 and 2007 there, the internships that sealed the ambition. The following year he cold-emailed Chris Bangle, then BMW's design director; further internships at BMW and Bugatti followed during his Robert College years.^[6][5]

He graduated from Robert College in Istanbul in 2009 — a school he credits, improbably for a car designer, with nurturing his other great subject: nature. Its green campus, he says, was "like a protected wildlife refuge in the middle of the dense city."^[7]

Art Center and the 901

Argüden took his degree in Transportation Design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His graduation project — the Porsche 901 concept, supervised by Jae Min — was a deliberate exercise in subtraction: the modern 911 had grown roughly twenty centimetres longer and far more complex than the original 901 of 1963, and the concept asked what the car would look like returned to that compact, essential form. Signature elements were kept — round lamps, the roofline arc, the tail — but rendered lighter and more purely; the engine-cover intakes nod to RSR intake trumpets, and the exhaust exits visibly beneath the rear lamps.^[8][9]

The exercise was covered by evo, autoevolution, and Classic Driver, and it travelled further than a student project usually does: Karl Ludwigsen's book Porsche: Excellence Was Expected credits Argüden as the designer of a future vision for the marque.^[6]

Dearborn

Argüden joined Ford Motor Company in 2015 and spent nearly a decade in Dearborn, rising from exterior designer to senior exterior designer. His credited production work includes the Ford Bronco Sport and Maverick, and he was the lead designer of the Explorer Timberline. His best-known proposal is the seventh-generation Mustang (S650, model year 2024): working in Ford's preproduction design team, he took his inspiration not from another car but from a sculpture of a leopard with its musculature exposed — the muscle groups, proportions, and coiled stance of the cat became the car's surfacing. Ford published his sketches as part of the car's official design story.^[10][7]

The method — form borrowed directly from biology — is biomimicry, and it runs through his work back to school projects like the Mercedes Aerolite, which took its lightweight structure from the pneumatic bone structure of an eagle. In his later Ford years he also worked on the company's transition to electrification.^[7][6]

Argüden Design

In 2023–24 Argüden left Dearborn and returned to Istanbul, founding Argüden Design — a studio working across automotive, yacht, and industrial design. The return was also a return to an earlier ambition: having sailed and yachted for years, he had called the sea his other love since childhood. He teaches Automotive Design at ELVTR, sits on design-competition juries, and speaks at industry events.^[6][11]

The notebook

In August 2026 a page from Argüden's hand-drawn sketchbook — observations ranging from the architectural details of Hagia Sophia to fish fins and natural geometry — drew wide attention on Turkish social media, covered by Anadolu Agency. Asked why the drawings resonated, he suggested that as AI-generated imagery spreads, people have begun to value "the original character and the handwork in hand drawing" all the more.^[12]