Badges, emblems, logos–whatever the term, every car has one, though some are more memorable than others. We forget the 1965 Rambler Marlin image, yet recall a certain jazzy Barracuda riveted on the same year’s Plymouth.
The Cadillac wreath and crest is forever. Crossed racing flags stamped on every Corvette aren’t going anywhere. Ditto for Thunderbird wings or the Viper snake head. They’re icons that retain basic design elements–though most do evolve.
Subtly.
Senior Graphic Designer Marie LaVerge-Webb learned as much in 1999, when her General Motors design team took on the assignment of re-tooling Cadillac’s wreath and crest. LaVerge-Webb found there’d been 30 revisions to the logo since 1906 with the last wholesale change in 1972.
“Getting rid of the fussiness was one goal,” she said. “Create a modern, art-science look. Something easily integrated into the Cadillac grille–without pushing too far. Give it a youthful feel but keep familiar features. We didn’t want to lose the colors in the crest, and there were other decisions. Do we have pearls on the crown above the crest? Do we have a crown at all? Do the merlettes [ducks] stay inside the crest? Not every Cadillac wreath and crest had merlets or a crown.”
Crowns and ducks on the Cadillac badge? Ducks and crowns were a constant between 1906 and 1957 and have come and gone since. “My personal favorites are the streamlined, retro looking crests [from the later 1940s and 1950s]. I didn’t grow up in that era-so they were fresh to me.
“We tried hundreds of versions before creating the one that was ultimately approved by Wayne Cherry [vice president of design]. We had them sculpted out of aluminum by hand to see how light reflected. There was a question of plating finishes–how to keep the design cost-effective to produce. We tried seven different finishes. It’s a teeter-totter exercise. You don’t want to lose brand equity in the wreath and crest that’s been built up over 100 years. That’s the essence of the logo. You look for a balance.”
The new look is more high tech, with tight, stylized “leaves” and no merlettes.
Ed Pinardi manages DaimlerChrysler’s Product Identity Studio had similar experiences when his group tweaked Dodge Viper’s emblem for the 2003 model year. Freshen the image, but don’t make it cartoonish.
Cadillac designers worked two years on the wreath and crest update, and Pinardi’s group had eight months with Viper. “One of our designers did a pictorial study showing the original Viper badge compared to the look for 2003. The first snakehead turned more sideways. If you look at the new one, it’s a serious snake! Menacing, facing you head-on.”
The review process on Viper was typical. “When you present them [the designs]–you know within 10 seconds. They either love them-or say, `My God, what’s happening here? What were you thinking?’
“The danger is in learning the personal preferences of your decision-makers and then designing to please them, to gain easy approval. You know going in that specific people like certain shapes and lettering styles, and you want to hit a home run, so you give them exactly what they’re looking for. A purist won’t design that way.”
Viper stayed with a cloisonne [metal and glass] finish for its 2003 badge. Pinardi says other super cars–Lamborghini and Ferrari–use a similar process for low-volume production.
Corvette, at 50, had more tradition than Viper for designers to consider when revamping the racing flags logo. Tom Speedwell led the design team that created a new Vette badge; he knew keeping the flags was a given. “At times the flags are more v-shaped or more horizontal. They’re larger and smaller-but they never leave. They’re within a circle or they stand alone. The emphasis now is on a v-shape,” he said.
“It took three people hundreds of sketches. Lots of tweaks before Dave Hill [chief engineer] would buy in.”
The Corvette “Flags of Distinction,” as Chevrolet calls them, have seen 15 revisions since 1953. Nobody recalls the designer who came up with the flags, though Bill Mitchell, creator of the 1959 prototype Sting Ray, was thought to have had a hand in pairing the checkered racing flag with a stylized Napoleonic battle flag.
Ford’s answer to the Corvette was, of course, the Thunderbird. The Thunderbird image is thought to have originated with Ford styling chief George Walker, who had a love of Native American lore and knew the legend of the Thunderbird.
Mark Conforzi, a senior designer at Ford, kept a 1957 T-Bird in the studio for team inspiration when his group created a new badge for the roadster’s re-introduction in 2000. “We tried to re-create the romance of the old Thunderbird, with the porthole window and egg-crate grille. The badge had to be simple, refined and clean, with a nod in execution to the original bird. We posted four words on the wall to keep us focused: American, bold, confident and free.
“We needed slightly different versions of the Thunderbird, because the image occurs a total of 11 times on each car on different surfaces. You want the wings to always appear horizontal, but to get that effect on a concave surface, for example, the wings have tip downward a little. It took a team 50 people to work all of this out and make it work.”
Jeffrey Godschall, a senior design manager at DaimlerChrysler, knew he wanted to design cars for Chrysler as a 14-year-old in 1955. Godschall, who designed the interior of the PT Cruiser, joined Chrysler in 1963 when his area was called the Ornamentation Studio. He knew Milt Antonik, who created the Barracuda fish badge. (“Milt did an in-house cartoon of the fish with a 1965 Mustang in its mouth–crunch!”) He talks about adding the asterisk above the “i” in the 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger logo, remembering how it was mistaken for a daisy. (“Those were Laugh-In flower power days!”)
Godschall tells of the Plymouth Duster 340’s original designation “CK” for Clark Kent. A cryptic empty phone booth decal, door ajar, adorned the exterior with the full Superman symbol emblazoned under the hood. (“That one almost made it out–until they said, `Nobody’s going to buy this!'”)
He knew Harvey Winn, creator of the Plymouth Super Bee cartoon symbol. He’s a student of historic non-Chrysler models, too. He talks of old Hudsons and Woolseys having lighted medallions, then shifts gears, telling how he added a dark railroad tunnel graphic to the rear deck of the 1975 Plymouth Road Runner. (Remember Wile E. Coyote sneaking down the darkened tunnel and hitting the wall or getting run over by a train?)
