First He Redesigned Moving On Ground. Now, Johad Ellis is Reinventing Air Travel.
From Uber to Ford, Johad Ellis has designed what moves us—Tune in to how he leverages his cultural curiosity, strong design foundation, and a relentless commitment to design excellence.
Before leaving for college, my mom and I were inseparable. Two years in, we talk almost every day (and multiple times a day) and our conversations can range anywhere from the new K-Drama she is obsessed with, the most recent guy I went out with, all the way to the new connection she made and how I may be able to learn from them or offer value in their area of work.
One day, she called while leaving a Moleskin Pop-Up, and excitingly shared that she was in a drawing competition— and that her subpar skills didn’t bring in a win— but that I NEEDED to meet the winner as he is not only a wicked talented illustrator, but a creative genius.
Johad Ellis is a seasoned industrial designer whose career spans leading roles at Uber, Ford, Volkswagon, Chrysler, and more. With roots in Colombia, Lebanon, and China, his multicultural perspective shapes the way he designs—with empathy, depth, and global awareness. Currently designing next-gen propulsion systems at Whisper Aero, Johad is working at the edge of what’s possible in future mobility.
In this conversation, we talk about everything from his early days sketching shoes at DASH in Miami to designing car interiors seen by millions, and now—building flight tech that could quietly reshape how we move. We dive into building trust in autonomous vehicles, the return of physical design, and the mindset creatives need to stay relevant in a rapidly shifting world.
You’ve built a career at the intersection of design, tech, and automotive. How did you first get into design, and what drew you to these industries?
I always liked sketching. And my mom, also an artist, saw promise in me— It was a family effort. Growing up in Colombia, there weren't many opportunities for designers. After immigrating to the U.S. at nine, my mom found Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) in Miami. Not a lot of 13 year-olds have a portfolio—I certainly didn't. So we went to a local paper goods store, got a portfolio with plastic sheets, put my sketches in there, and applied. Getting into DASH was the seed.
At DASH, I had to choose to become an architect or an industrial designer. By stroke of luck, I had a group of peers that all wanted to do footwear design. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I wanted to observe the world, see components, and put them together to make something creative of my own. So I started there, and eventually got into the automotive world by sheer nature of it being very complex geometry.
If you can design cars, you can backpedal and design other things, whereas the reverse wouldn't work. Developing design acuity for vehicle design was tough. I embraced the challenge, studied at College for Creative Studies in Detroit (Motor City), became a traditional car designer, then shifted toward emerging technologies—self-driving cars, and now aerospace.
Do you think your diverse cultural background influences your design approach?
Definitely. Design is a service discipline where one solves problems through empathy. Having a Colombian-Lebanese-Chinese background gives me cultural context and empathy, enabling me to understand a wide range of user perspectives.
I also immerse myself in while traveling. Every time I'm in a new city, I soak up culture, art, design — building an internal, subconscious repository of images and design solutions.
You don't choose what lineage you're born with, but having cultural curiosity is paramount for designers.
What's your "creative capital," the unique value driving your success?
I’ve often asked myself that question. I think my Creative Capital is taking nascent tech and implementing it in a way that is current-day viable, accessible, and digestible for users. For example, with self-driving cars, many people initially felt apprehensive because designs weren't consumer-ready. I found purpose in transforming unfamiliar, new tech into products people could trust and use comfortably; taking nascent tech and making it viable to the masses.
How do you establish trust in users for autonomous vehicles?
Perceived quality is critical. The tighter and more thought-through the product appears and functions, the more trust you instill in the user.
Early adopters are always going to try the new tech first. But not everyone's an early adopter. To bring in mass market adoption, you need to gain the user's trust. To gain the user's trust, the end-to-end experience has to be delightful, reliable, and seamless.
You’ve worked at Ford, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Uber—How is each experience uniquely different or the same?
Every company I've worked at shared a common thread: aiming for design excellence, though definitions varied by context. In Germany, one-line design thinking was big. The emphasis was minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired simplicity.
My career unfolded in phases. When I graduated, I was excited to design cars, whatever they might be—Volkswagen became a formative experience, especially due to mentorship. My manager there, a lifelong friend of Japanese heritage living in Germany, fortified my foundational skills.
Later, at Kia in Southern California, I had the privilege of designing the Kia Soul interior, in conjunction with a theme from the Germany studio, finalized in collaboration with designers in Korea. At 25, being able to orchestrate a theme and seeing it translate into three dimensions—collaborating with 3D modelers, ergonomic engineers, and more—was extremely formative.
That traditional automotive foundation gave me the skillset to explore introducing emerging technologies into some of these understood paradigms.
Design excellence and strong foundations are the common denominator across everything all these ventures. But the mission statement changes with each season. Each career season brought new focus—first traditional car design, then autonomous vehicles, and now, it’s flight propulsion aerospace season.
Tell me more about Whisper Aero—what inspires you there?
Whisper Aero has been incredibly exciting. I know the founders from my time at Uber, where we had an entire team dedicated to making it possible to hail a flying car through the app. Eventually, Uber decided to off-ramp that initiative into another path, and the founders decided to create their own company. I had worked with them on a few projects, and we worked well together. We reconnected, and I opted in.
What keeps me excited about Whisper Aero is the ability for this electric quiet propulsion technology to be applied to many products. It can be scaled up in service of air mobility and down to something as small as a leaf blower. We’re eager about the possibilities ahead.
In design school, we often hear "if you design for everybody, you design for nobody.” What’s your take?
I couldn't agree more with that statement. You should design for mass market adoption, but never for everyone. There's always a target market. Without one, you don't have requirement bounds of what it should be; You’re stabbing in the dark. It's always good to have focus and a targeted approach while still allowing for flexibility and creativity. You're able to distill those requirements and design for the people that will appreciate the product and hopefully be a champion of it. If that target market is huge, that's okay. But you need to know who you're designing for.
What emerging trends or tech should creatives watch?
I’m noticing an interesting trend—parts of the industry are starting to shift from prioritizing strictly digital products back toward physical experiences. Companies are gunning for space exploration, robotics, flight, etc. There's a revival in hardware design.
There's something uniquely human people are craving that is experienced in three dimensions. Even at the intersection of digital and physical— there's this innate desire to experience things outside of two dimensions.
What three pieces of advice would you give an emerging designer?
Align your passion with the “fast moving water”—areas of strong market opportunity. Your number one goal should be finding product-market fit.
Don't forget the foundations. Master them—dedicate focused effort to your craft. There are a lot of ways to skip the foundations these days. Spend hours learning a thing and getting better at it. Put those 10,000 hours in to master a piece of software, a tool, a pencil. Put the distractions away.
Never stop learning—staying adaptable makes mastering new tools easier throughout your career. When I graduated, few designers were using polygonal modeling tools, but I eventually picked them up. Then Figma came out, I learned Figma. Now we have a wave of VR and AI tools for designers - which I'm currently tinkering with.