Proportions are everything. Especially when you’re messing with things we observe every day. They are the invisible lines that stitch familiarity to feeling, the difference between something feeling honest or something feeling wrong.
Most of us don’t think about it when it comes to cars. We just know when it feels right. We walk up to a car and there it is. Car. It just sits there doing its thing how it's always looked. It's native. That's a 911, or a Mini, or a Mustang, that's what it looks like. The length of the roof, the rake of the windshield, the way a rear fender swells against a skinny tire or hugs around a fat one. It either clicks in your mind or it doesn't. You don't need to be an artist or an engineer to know when something’s off. Your brain tugs at your sleeve. "I spend a lot of time sitting and tweaking the wireframe," Andrew said. "Getting the proportions right is everything. If it feels off, it is off."
Andrew Ritter, the artist behind Ritter Goods, understands that better than most. He takes the legendary machines we know and reshapes them into something playful, lighter, but without breaking what makes them iconic in the first place. It’s a delicate kind of surgery. One transform too far here, a few pixels too high there, and the magic vanishes and makes us subconsciously uncomfortable. It’s not the kind of thing you can fake. It either feels right or it doesn’t. And Ritter’s models feel right.
It is the same way Andrew thinks about the cars he drives. His dream car is not an F40 or a turbocharged trophy. It is a Mini. A car built on simplicity, honesty, and fun. "I do not need the rarest car," he said. "I just want to have fun behind the wheel." That philosophy runs straight through his work.
With Ritter’s newest project, a series of prints and renders cataloging the more obscure early, hungry years of the Kremer brothers' racing team, you can see his brain working in directly. These aren't just cartoons of cars. They're totems, meticulously referenced and recreated, bridging that childlike sense of wonder with the adult pull of history. They wake up the curiosity we forget about, the kind that shifts and dulls as we get older, and sharpen it again, reminding us why we ever cared in the first place.
Born out of Porsche's need for a lighter, faster car to meet FIA Group 4 regulations, the 1970 911ST was a special variant of the early 911, stripped down and widened up to battle on track and rally stage alike. The Kremer brothers decided to pick one up and take it to the track. They were not just chasing a dream, they were leveraging the ST's raw capability. They were wrenching on a car that still shared its bones with the street cars parked outside their shop, and somehow turned it into a class winner at Le Mans. "It’s wild to me that two brothers just decided to start racing, and they ended up redefining Porsche motorsport," Ritter said. "That kind of story feels impossible today." It is a car that at first glance looks like any other early 911 with a bit of flared muscle, until you know it took first place at Le Mans. A privateer effort on a rain soaked track. Full factory teams spinning themselves out or drowning in mechanical failures. And here comes the Kremer brothers, wrenching and racing out of a shop that could’ve been on your own street, winning the day, and setting the foundation for Kremer, and Porsche in motorsport for decades.
After proving they could win with the ST, the Kremer brothers needed something faster, sharper, and better suited to the escalating demands of European endurance racing. 1973 would also mark Erwin Kremer's final season behind the wheel, a fitting final act before he stepped fully into team leadership. Enter the 1973 RSK 2.8, a car born from Kremer's evolution beyond the ST, taking lessons learned and applying them to a modified RSR platform. With wider arches, bigger brakes, and a heart built for endurance, it was a weapon for the European circuits, and it delivered. It quite literally flies through the Six Hours of the Nürburgring. In Andrew's world, it lifts off just a little more, the proportions stretching reality a hair, giving gravity a respectful nod before flipping it the bird. This wasn't just an artful choice, it mirrored the car's tangible world trajectory. Chassis 0885 didn't just compete, it won the Porsche Cup and the European GT Championship that year. Its sister car, 0610, took class honors at Le Mans that year, a crowning moment that helped make 1973 one of the most winning years for Kremer Racing.
There is a bigger thing happening here too. Art like this matters more now than it ever has. As the creative world leans harder into AI, true art is getting pulled further away from the surface. AI does not create. It loops and imitates, turning the things we love into cyclical regurgitation. The human hand, the human mind, the human obsession to get something like proportions right, that is what keeps art alive. Andrew’s work is proof that true creation matters more now than it ever did. If we are not careful, we will take the valuable tool that is AI and turn it into a paint roller, smearing history underneath an eggshell white of ones and zeros. It will strip away the human mistakes, the tiny triumphs, the slight wobbles in the line that tell you someone was here, that someone cared. Without artists like Andrew, the memory of what things actually were, not just how they looked, slips out from between our fingers. History becomes less a living thing and more a sterile echo. The human story, flattened into something easier to sell, but harder to love. A blurred photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a...
Ritter isn't just pulling from some dataset. He is pouring over dusty photographs, old race reports, grainy snapshots of history that are themselves starting to fade. "If I do not capture these moments, I do not trust my memory to hold on to them," Andrew said, reflecting on a frantic need to preserve a world that feels like it is slipping away. He is not building "content." He is preserving. Reinterpreting, sure. But preserving. And doing it with the kind of obsessive care that is reserved for things that are in danger of being lost.
Andrew’s work is a kind of reverence without religion. It is a way of celebrating history without turning it into a fossil. It moves. It smiles. It invites you in, even if you have never so much as touched a 911, or spent a minute thumbing through photos of Kremer’s rain slick victories.
That is why you can feel the hand behind it all, because there is one. You can trace every line back to a wrist, to a memory, to a decision made by someone who understands proportion the way the human eye was built to a brain sharpened by years of development to instantly recognize what is wrong, or in rare cases like this, to lock on to something absolutely right. Someone who knows the weight of a fender flare done properly, who understands the difference between "close enough" and "absolutely correct."
Proportion is everything.
