The current design of the Ford Focus was originally launched in Europe, then brought to the US based on that success. So that American ingenuity came in the form of a German design team…
(It’s a pity Ford isn’t doing the same with the current European Focus, as it’s been a hugely successful redesign. The official line is that “Americans don’t go for the European engineering.”)

As far as being built here in the US, so are the vast majority of Toyotas and Hondas. (However, Toyota’s Scion line is currently all import, as is most of the Lexus brand, though I believe there’s RX400 production in Canada for a couple of years now).

jason3d says: When I heard they were bringing back the GTO I was looking forward to something that would look like a muscle car. Boy was I disappointed. How long are they going to keep churning out that Grand Am/Prix/Bonneville body style?? They all look alike!

I know I’m straying from the topic at hand but I have to defend the GTO here. The GTO is a Pontiac-badged Holden Monaro, made in Australia. It was not developed alongside the Grand Am/Prix/Bonneville. It was, in fact, based on elements of the Holden Commodore. Much better looking, in my humble opinion, than anything else Pontiac has attempted in the last… forever. Although they still somehow made the Monaro look worse.

After rounds and rounds of phone calls with the dealer about how all this could happen right when the warranty ends the best I could get from him was a $450 ‘Warranty Adjustment’ I still ended up paying almost $2,300 for repairs that would have mostly been covered 60days prior. I dumped the Focus for the Vibe and never looked back. I doubt I’ll ever buy a Ford again.

FYI you may want to keep an eye on the breaks. You know how breaks used to squeak when they need new pads? According to the break shop Ford has designed their breaks not to do that. I guess it’s a bit of aluminum that makes it squeak. So with Fords you don’t get any indication your breaks need attention, they just go. Breaks were fine one day next day as we drove it started to sound like our tires were wobbling, drove it to the shop and by the time we got there it sounded like we were driving on a flat.

Sorry for the rant, I’d just hate to see you get burned like I did. Maybe the 04 is fine.

Jason – the Focus set records for the number of recalls on the 2000 and 2001 models. It got better, but as of the 2003 model, there were still issues, particularly with water leaks in the passenger cabin (a fact I learned the hard way with a rental…).

Jason3d: Thanks for the heads up — I will have to pay attention to that. I made sure my warranty lasted as long as my payments, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best in a few years :)

La Logotheque also has flags. The logos are mysteriously accessibly only through the “alphabetic search” near top. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to get at them through the actual navbar.

Hockey Logos. No vector downloads, but decent-size images that are generally clear enough you can get a good trace off them if you need to.

AllTheLogos.com charges a fee for the manual processing of e-mailing a logo to you. Um…’kay. But if you can’t find it anywhere else, I suppose.

Aerosite.net has airline logos, plan specs and livery designs. No downloads, unfortunately, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across this stuff anywhere else.

While proper design processes are ideal, blogs have allowed a design-on-the-fly which is a refreshing change from paying work. Readers feel involved in the process and constant feedback sometimes yields very interesting and practical perspectives.

The Mozile extension for Firefox is their answer I think. It uses methods more in-line with the direction that the W3C is heading for denoting editable areas using CSS attributes (at this point, Mozilla-only versions of ‘user-modify’, ‘user-input’ and ‘user-select’).

It outputs valid XHTML and also seems have a more streamlined way of submitting the data directly through a POST, webDAV connection or ontp a local drive. No need to script a transfer between your editable area and a hidden form field! Yay!

The only downside I can see is that it is Gecko-specific. But I remember another company that introduced a non-standard attribute called ‘contentEditable’ that only worked in their browser and now everyone wants to use it. :P

I wanted to do something like Mike Davidson did before I even read his blog this morning, but nonetheless, I wanted to combine a few topics together in one post….