Jonathan Kyte is an industrial designer with a thirst for creative expression and a ton of experience in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of race car design.
And now he’s bringing that creativity and experience into a different arena of industrial design —product development.
Where race car design is a more structured process of CAD design, wind-tunnel testing, and technical revision—product development requires much more creativity and open dialogue, not to mention ruminating over actual foam models and functional prototypes; envisioning all aspects of the final product in people’s hands.
But we’ll get to that.
In spring 2021 he started with SPARK as a contractor—and in March 2022 he’s moving to Richmond to join the SPARK team fulltime.
How did you get started in industrial design?
I grew up in Detroit so I was surrounded by car culture and completely obsessed. All I ever did was draw cars. We’d go to the Detroit Grand Prix, the Woodward Dream Cruise, the Detroit Auto Show—as a kid I’d go home and just fill up notebooks with car drawings.
Then in 8th grade we moved to a small steel town in Ohio where I finished high school and attended nearby Youngstown State University. They asked me, What do you want to do? I said I want to design cars. They said you have to be an engineer. I said, Nope!
No way that would work—me and math are like oil and water.
That was in the early 90s before the internet so I didn’t even know industrial design existed. So I got into fine art and graphic design, getting a BFA, working on early internet stuff like Flash animation.
Some years later I was visiting family in Michigan and my sister had a booklet she had saved for me from CCS (College for Creative Studies) and I flipped through the pages and saw their Industrial Design program and car sketching courses.
I was like, This is it! This is what I've always wanted to do, but didn’t know it existed. That was my eureka moment.
What made you want to work with SPARK?
My wife is from Virginia Beach and the plan had always been to move back closer to family. Then Covid happened and we were working from home, which gave us a chance to re-evaluate life and figure out what’s next.
I’d spent the past 10 years designing race cars in North Carolina. It’s a demanding industry and the role I found myself in wasn’t allowing for as much creativity as I wanted.
We decided it was time for a fresh start.
I started searching for “industrial design in Virgina” to see what was even available and came across SPARK, and reading through their portfolio I liked what I saw.
I found Bruce on LinkedIn and reached out about an industrial design position. The conversation went from there. I’ve been freelancing with them for a while, and now it’s time for the next step.
How do you feel about leaving car design?
I got into car design not because I love car design—but because I love cars. Everything about them. I’ve got a vintage 1972 MGB in pieces in my garage.
But racing design burns you out. It’s nonstop, intense, fast paced. Basically everything needed to be done yesterday. And you don’t get the satisfaction of completing a project because one thing just leads to another like an assembly line.
Fact is, I’m excited to get back into cars as a hobby. You know, I’d basically stopped watching racing for a while because it was like working on the weekends.
What’s a struggle you face in your new role?
For the past 10 years, my work has been very technical. Honestly I was worried about pigeonholing myself as a CAD designer instead of a more creative role.
It feels good to shake the rust off again with pen and markers and paper. It’s an interesting way of working that I have to get used to again. Drawing and sketching and brainstorming ideas.
But every time I put pen to paper I feel this need to make something great. Especially in the beginning steps though, it’s more about getting ideas out and brainstorming together.
I have to remind myself—not everything has to be a finished masterpiece. One of the big values of SPARK’s process is they understand how to collect and discard ideas on the way to creating the best product possible.
What are you looking forward to about working with the SPARK team?
As far as the team, I’m excited about the intermingling of designers and engineers in SPARK’s process. It’s definitely engineering-based product development, but Chris has the engineers doing sketches and ideation—everyone’s part of the big picture here. I’m used to working with engineers, but not quite as blended as this.
I prefer working with a small, tight-knit group like this. It sort of has a skunkworks feel about it, where everyone jumps in and helps out wherever they can. Anything and everything can come along and you get to work on it. I love that!
My previous job was much more focused on CAD work and body design—10 years of basically the same thing every day. So I’m excited to be creative again; things like working with foam models which I haven’t done in a long time. It’s a whole different experience being hands-on.
To sit and sketch and then brainstorm and work on a model and then do CAD and maybe some photography—I love the diversity of everything and you never know what’s going to come up during the day. That’s the real beauty of SPARK.