Omer Halilhodžić (Mostar 1963) is a Bosnian-Herzegovinian car designer. In 1989, he graduated product design at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Sarajevo. As a student, he already won the Bernardo Bernardi Award of the Nikita Zhukov Foundation.
Before him, the recipients of this award were Mirko Ilić (1987) and Selma Arnautović (1988). Halilhodžić is currently one of the leaders in the creative team of the Škoda Company (2012), where he designs Superb, Kodiaq and Vision IV. Prior to Škoda he worked as the designer – head of the exterior design team for Ferrari (2011), Mercedes-Benz (2008), Mitsubishi Motors (1995–2008), and Volkswagen (1992–1995).
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, he worked for the TAS Company in Sarajevo (1992) and Hercegovina auto in Mostar (1991–1992). For Mitsubishi Motors he designed Mitsubishi Colt (2004) models: CZ2, CZ3, CZ3 cabriolet, as well as CZT. He is also the author of Mitsubishi Concept Sportback, Concept X, from which Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X and Concept Pajero were developed. Unfortunately, in this selection we do not have the examples of the best creations of Omer Halilhodžić because they have become the industrial property and a part of the “secret” that now belongs to car production companies. But, even the examples that have been available to us give an indication of design choices of their author. Omer, like his great role model Leonardo da Vinci, carefully observes the world of nature, recognising and extracting from it the most significant phenomena and processes, analysing them carefully and then transforming them into “characters and lines”, which will be, like signs on the road, clear indicators of his conceptual ideas and creative sources.
In the drawings on the margins of his sketchbooks, we can often see contours and faces, bodies and movements – movements of animals as well as human grimaces, which he translates, using a reductive drawing method, into the plays and tensions between lines and linear structures. In a qualitative sense, lines are not the carriers of technical information, although – the nature of technological process within which these ideas are inevitably “materialised” as forms – the forms of cars of characteristic features – demands a very clear and precise type of lines (hard and regular), but they are also above that – symbolic and sensual (soft), having a sensibility of their author and carrying aesthetic information about form.