中文LEONHARD KURZ has earned an Honorable Mention at the European Product Design Award 2026 for its FrontIQ Light Concept, recognized in the Conceptual Automotive and Transport Product Design category. The development reimagines conventional automotive headlights as three-dimensional design elements that combine lighting, surface decoration, and vehicle communication. Created with SWAROVSKI MOBILITY and lighting systems specialist SP3, the concept incorporates precisely positioned crystals for light guidance and visual depth, complemented by a holographic carbon structure that turns a functional component into a brand signature.
Beyond conventional headlights, FrontIQ integrates dynamic cornering lights, daytime running lights, turn signals, and communication features that convey information to other road users. Amber lighting identifies turn signals, while cyan illumination indicates automated driving status, making the headlight a two-way interface between vehicle and environment. Luitpold Haarlander, Head of Sales Management Mobility at KURZ, said the concept demonstrates how lighting technology can contribute to vehicle identity, communication, and interaction when design and engineering expertise are combined early in development, rather than decoration being applied as an afterthought.
The recognition is a useful signal of where decorative surface technology is heading. KURZ built its reputation in foil and surface finishing for print and packaging, and FrontIQ shows how those competencies translate into entirely different industries. The move into automotive lighting illustrates the portability of decorative and functional coating know-how when it is paired with the right engineering partners, opening adjacency markets that are less cyclical than any single end use.
For the print and finishing supply chain, concepts like this matter because they show how precision application, light management, and decorative structuring that serve premium packaging can find demand in mobility, consumer electronics, and architecture. Suppliers that can cross those boundaries are less exposed to the ups and downs of one sector. The collaboration model is also worth noting: KURZ brought surface and decorative expertise, SWAROVSKI MOBILITY contributed crystal and light aesthetics, and SP3 supplied lighting systems engineering, a cross-industry partnership that is increasingly how breakthrough concepts are built rather than a single company mastering every discipline.
For a sector accustomed to incremental product refinement, FrontIQ is a reminder that recognition often goes to those who reframe where and how decoration creates value, treating a headlight not as a commodity part but as a programmable design surface that communicates.
The automotive context is strategic for KURZ. As vehicles become platforms for lighting and display, the surfaces around those elements become canvases for differentiation, and that is precisely the kind of high-value decorative work where finishing specialists thrive. The electric and automated vehicle era is compressing the timeline for such innovation, because lighting is now also a language for signaling a car’s mode and intent to pedestrians and other drivers.
There is a manufacturing angle too. Decorative surface technologies that work on a cosmetics carton must be re-engineered to survive automotive thermal, UV, and vibration loads, but the underlying competence, precise application of thin functional and aesthetic layers, transfers. KURZ’s ability to cross that barrier demonstrates the resilience of finishing expertise when it is treated as a platform rather than a single-market skill.
For printers and converters watching the award, the takeaway is that the boundaries between print decoration and industrial design are porous. The same mastery of foil, coating, and structured surfaces that wins packaging business can, with the right partners, win mobility and electronics business. FrontIQ’s European Product Design Award recognition is a data point suggesting that the judges see that potential. It is a quiet encouragement for finishing suppliers to think beyond the substrate they know best and to approach new industries as design collaborators, not just component vendors.
Source: https://inkish.news/en/article/kurz-frontiq-light-concept-earns-european-design-recognition
