What do the top ten most famous car logos have in common? They are all pictorial marks. From Audi’s iconic four interconnecting circles to Toyota’s horizontal and vertical spheres, most car brands, whether luxury or otherwise, use the power of pictorial logos to show-off their brands.
So what is this power and what it contains? How has it compelled these billion dollar companies to favor this one automobile logo style over all others?
We share it all in this article.
Practical reasons first. Pictorial logos are icon-based. Meaning, they don’t use lengthy words or combinations of words and pictures that take up a lot of space. In automobiles, there isn’t much space available to display the logo. If you try to take up more space than what is customary, you run the risk of ruining the car’s design.
Therefore, small and minimalist pictorial marks are chosen to make the most of the available space. The minimalism also suits the automotive industry on an aesthetic level. The specific, succinct, and precise pictures lend a higher level of authority and dominance to the brand.
Circular logo with wings
Image Source: Behance
Continuing the point about aesthetics, pictorial marks are probably the most iconic and easily recallable logo styles there are. As design is an amalgamation of art and practical needs, these stylish logos help designers strike the perfect balance.
Usually executed in one-tone colors, pictorial automobile logo ideas help tell a comprehensive and consistent brand story. As most of these pictorial car logos are in metallic shades, they elevate a simple picture by adding gloss and shine to it.
Image Source: Dribbble
Image Source: Dribbble
In our daily lives we are bombarded with an onslaught of visual and auditory stimuli. Most of the time, these onslaught is in the form of design. Product packaging, logos everywhere, signboards, store fronts, the coffee cup in our hands, all of it continues to transmit communication to us, forcing us to understand it, recall it, and absorb it.
In this entire onslaught, the things that catch our attention and make an impression on us are almost always the simplest and most intriguing images. Instead of remembering sentences, words, colors or sounds, we are asked only to look at a simple image. The sheer simplicity of it helps us ignore all else and focus on that tiny mark.
In the world of design and marketing, that’s battle half won. Automotive industry makes the perfect use of this psychological bias in graphic design. It gives us simple and interesting shapes and leaves the rest to us.
Tool icons in a logo with circular outline
Image Source: Behance
The reason we use logos is to make our brand identity famous among our audience. We want them to know who we are, what we do, and why we do it. We use it to identify ourselves and to distinguish ourselves from the rest. The process we use to do all that is called branding.
The pictorial marks of car logos make automotive branding supremely easy. Unlike combination logos or wordmark logos, pictorial marks make it easy to be displayed, printed, and produced on a number of marketing materials: product packaging, website headers, store fronts, staff uniforms. They don’t take up a lot of space and help print the car logo design in simple and neat aesthetics.
Yellow and Black road logo
Image Source: Dribbble
Pictorial marks for car logos can be quite diverse. There is no shortage of logo icons, colors, or additional styles you can use to create a stunning pictorial automotive mark. They also give you the most diversity when it comes to design evolution, to show company progress, or even in situations where the brand needs to mark a special occasion.
You take just that one shape and edit portions of it to show the range of its attributes. For example, in Pride month, most brands replace their brand colors on their pictorial logos with the colors of the Pride flag.
This diversity of design and application is almost exclusive to pictorial marks.
Circles with a swoosh in logo
Image Source: Dribbble
From practical to artistic and from psychological to promotional, a number of reasons make the pictorial style the most famous design in the automobile industry. To master it, think about aspects of your brand, vehicle, or the company philosophy that can be captured into crisp, single graphics. That way, you are not only showing your design prowess but also telling an interesting story/anecdote through your artistic piece.
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