SOME of TIME'S editorial color pages are produced on a schedule that in office lingo is known as "fast color"--for example, last week's two pages of pictures on Broadway's new star, Barbra Streisand, which were taken the night after Funny Girl opened and ran in the next week's issue. But other col or projects have a more extended genesis, as is the case with this week's six pages on the design of new cars in Detroit. In fact, there is considerable similarity between the process of creating the cars and the job of developing the story--in terms of ideas, time, talent and effort involved.

The idea for this color story actually has been germinating for several years, during which the curiosity of TIME staffers has been piqued by the closed, locked, guarded doors at Detroit's automobile design centers. Last fall Senior Editor Cranston Jones, who recalls that those closed doors have been bothering him off and on ever since he saw them at the General Motors Technical Center in 1956, proposed a color story that would get behind them. Detroit Bureau Chief Leon Jaroff tried the idea on the automakers and got one after another of them to agree. Next step was for Associate Editor Peter Bird Martin, whose assignment is color projects, to work out a specific plan for the story.

Enter the photographer. He is Detroit Free Lancer J. Edward Bailey, 40, who does much of TIME'S photographic work in the Detroit area. Once he had the assignment, Ed Bailey read up on automobile styling over a period of two months, digging into books and pamphlets and learning to toss off inside jargon like "Di-Noc" and "frisket knife." Before he took a picture, he spent five days at the four auto manufacturers' studios, testing lighting for color film and filters used under artificial light mixed with daylight. Then he worked for 22 days in the auto design centers with seven cameras carefully selected from the 28 he has in his studio.

At first, the photographer found the stylists a bit skittish: "They kept covering up next year's models, hiding this bumper or that deck-line." In the end, however, Bailey realized that "it was the first time anyone with a camera had been in so many areas of styling and had taken so many pictures. Each time I went back, I found I could go a little bit farther than the previous time." Now he feels that no new car will surprise him until 1967--"anything earlier is old hat to me."

While the color projects team was producing the color pages, Business Editor Edward L. Jamieson and Writer Everett Martin were putting together the cover story, and Painter Bernard Safran was at work on his portrait of Ford's Lee Iacocca. As it is with developing a new car in Detroit, the long process of producing this kind of major story tends to leak out, and other publications rush to get into the act. But we have full confidence in the reader's ability to differentiate between a finished design and the ones that ran into trouble in the wind tunnel.

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