BizAims

A logo is a graphic mark or emblem  commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect. The logo (ideogram), is the image embodying an organization.

In the automotive world the logos and emblems are less important than what auto designers call “down the road graphics. The goal is that from a distance the three dimensional form of a vehicle read itself reads a flat image, a stop-action graphic. Ideally, the brand of the vehicle should be visible form the any angles. The term “Down the road graphics” have to be visible from all angles, including the most oblique ones.

We present the logo's  history of some famous automobile companies:

PART  I: ABARTH, ALFA ROMEO, ASTON MARTIN, AUDI, BMW, BUIK,CADILLAC, CHEVROLET, CHRYSLER, CITROEN, CIZETA, CORVETTE

PART  II: DAEWOO, DODGE, FERRARI, FIAT, FORD, HONDA, HUMMER, HYUNDAI, INFINITY, ISUZU, JAGUAR

ABARTH

Abarth is an Italian racing car maker founded by Italian-Austrian Karl (Carlo) Abarth in Turin in 1949.

Abarth was sold to Fiat on July 31 1971, and the racing team sold to Enzo Osella. Abarth became the racing department of Fiat, managed by famed engine designer Aurelio Lampredi. Its logo comprises several elements, including the company's name just on top of all the others.

The overall shape of the emblem represents a shield and denotes strength and power, thus demonstrating Abarth's capacity to resist over time and become a top player in the automotive world.

The three colors underneath the company's name, green, white and red, symbolize Italy's flag, as the company was brought to life in Turin. The scorpion is Karl Abarth's astrological sign – he was born on November 15, 1908 – and is complemented by the two dominating colors, yellow and red, which are indicating the brand's appeal for motor racing.

ALFA ROMEO

Alfa Romeo, the car manufacturer and pride of Italy, traced its beginnings to France. In 1910, Milan aristocrat Cavaliere Ugo Stella collaborated with the French car company Darracq to market the line in Italy. When the partnership failed, Stella moved the company and renamed it Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (Lombard Automobile Factory, Public Company) or A.L.F.A. Alfa Romeo’s distinctive logo was created in 1910 by a draftsman named Romano Cattaneo.  Inspired from the House of Visconti flag, the so-called "biscione" (the Italian term for grass snake) actually represents one's ability to stand against opponents and face competition. Additionally, Cattaneo added the red cross seen in the Milan flag, plus the Alfa Romeo designation separated by two Savoia dynasty knots. Over time, the knots were eliminated from the logo, with each symbol comprising the logo receiving minor "redesigns".

ASTON MARTIN

Aston Martin Lagonda Limited is a British manufacturer of luxury sports cars, based in Gaydon, Warwickshire. The company name is derived from the name of one of the company's founders, Lionel Martin, and from the Aston Hill speed hillclimb near Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. It all started in 1913 when two cycling buddies, over a couple pints at the end of a long day on the hill climbs decided to go into business together. The two men where Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford. They started out selling Singer automobiles. They were both handy mechanics and Lionel was an accomplished driver. In 1914 the two decided to start to build there own vehicles and Aston Martin was born. We can’t talk about Aston Martin without mentioning James Bond. In 1959, Ian Fleming put his super spy James Bond in an Aston Martin DB Mark III. When it was made into a movie in 1964, Bond drove an updated, supersleek silver Aston Martin DB5 (complete with machine gun, passenger ejector seat, and revolving number plates!) Interestingly, Ian Fleming himself didn’t drive Aston Martin. He preferred the 1963 Studebaker Avanti! The history of the Aston  Martin logo is uncertain, if you know anything please let us know us.

AUDI

The "brand with the four rings" as Audi is often called is currently one of the world's top automakers and surely a leading German brand. Its logo, seen on millions of cars sold worldwide, is believed to have multiple meanings.

First of all, the emblem is seen as a symbol of the merger that took place in 1932 and included four large manufacturers of that time: Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. Together with the NSU brand, which joined in 1969, these companies are the roots of the present-day AUDI AG.

After the war the Audi name - which is Latin for "Hear!" - disappeared, but was revived in 1965, using the four rings as a logo. Also, the name is sort of a pun on 'hoerch', German for 'hear', name of one of the founders.  The company itself is more than a century old. The new logo, released in September 2009 changes the font and also improves on the 3-dimensional aspect of the rings.

BMW

BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke or Bavarian Motor Company. In 1913, Karl Friedrich Rapp and Gustav Otto founded two separate aircraft factories that would later merge to form BMW or Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (Bavarian Motor Works).

The logo comprised of four quadrants of alternating white and blue color. It is a stylized representation of an airplane propeller spinning against the clear blue sky.

The logo represents a white propeller blade against a blue sky. It reflects the origins of BMW as a maker of military aircraft engines during WWI.

Also, white and blue are the traditional colors of Bavaria. The logo itself hasn’t changed a lot during the years, but now has a more stylish look due to the different gradients.

The unchanged logo has made it easier for people to remember and has given the company more recognition.

BUICK

The Buick Motor Company was founded in 1903 by David Dunbar Buick, a Scottish-American inventor who invented the overhead valve engine.

If you didn’t recognize the name, you’re not alone – but remember this: Buick, a high school drop out founded a company that later became the world’s largest auto company, General Motors.

The Buick logo's  history includes several logo changes that occurred as the company grew bigger. The first logos were actually variations of the Buick designation, but were replaced during the '60s by three shields representing the three models rolled out until that point: LeSabre, Invicta, and Electra.

1975 brought a new change of logo at Buick, with the American icon now adopting a hawk emblem, known at that time as "Happy", that was expected to mark the beginning of a new design era in Buick's history.

The moment was celebrated with the introduction of the Skyhawk series. However, the range was discontinued during the '80s, when Buick re-adopted its three-shield badge.

CADILLAC

The original Cadillac logo is based on the family crest of the man for whom the company was named, the Gascon officer and minor aristocrat who founded Detroit in 1701-Antoine de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac. His coat of arms, like many family coats of arms, appears to have been concocted and borrowed from a nobler neighbor. This may be appropriate for a car that has often appealed to the self-made man-if the not the nouveau riche hustler.

Both the name and the logo used by Cadillac were based on the aristocrat the company was named after, Antoine de La Mothe, Seigneur de Cadillac, but the badge suffered several modifications, especially under GM's ownership. The auto manufacturing business received the Cadillac designation in 1902 but during the '90s General Motors brought a few changes as part of an effort to refresh the company's image. The logo thus dropped the six birds (codenamed merlettes), as well as the crown and the La Mothe family crest, but adopted simpler elements that are still being used nowadays.

CHEVROLET

In case you're wondering where does the Chevrolet "plus" symbol comes from, there are several suppositions behind it. First of all, some people are saying that William C. Durant actually designed the logo after a wallpaper he saw in a French hotel. On the other hand, others are claiming that this badge was first seen in a newspaper and Durant's wife proposed it to be used as Chevrolet's logo.

The origins of the famous Chevrolet "bowtie" brand image has always been steeped in mystery. While no one denies that William Durant introduced the now-famous bowtie symbol to represent the automobile, there are different stories as to how the idea originated.

Official publications from the company itself describe how William Durant was traveling in Paris in 1908 and saw a pattern of bowties "marching off into infinity" on the wallpaper of a French hotel. As the story goes, Durant took a piece of the wallpaper and brought it home, eventually using the image as the inspiration for the Chevrolet log.

Durant's own family denies this urban legend as pure myth. In 1929, Durant's own daughter described how her father brainstormed many different ideas for the Chevrolet Bowtie at the dinner table, and "between the soup and the fried chicken" he finally came up with the design that would be used on every Chevrolet automobile afterwards.

In 1986, Chevrolet Pro Management Magazine published an interview with William Durant's wife where she describes how William was inspired by the image while reading a Virginia newspaper while they were in Hot Springs, Virginia on vacation. According to Durant's wife, he commented on the logo - mentioning that it would make a great emblem for Chevrolet. The mystery deepens when you consider that the company has William Durant on record as confirming the Paris story. Ultimately, the truth could be that all of these events transpired together to form what eventually became one of the most recognized car logos in the world.

CHRYSLER

The Chrysler logo has undergone quite a few changes over the years; the one shown here is an adaptation of the original medallion logo used on Chrysler cars at its inception in 1925. This logo was brought back to use in 1994, and the pair of silver wings were added after the company merged with Daimler-Benz in 1998. Now that Chrysler's been sold to Cerberus, they're switching back to the Pentastar design, though the cars are still using the logo shown here.

CITROEN

There's nothing fancy or too complicated in Citroen's logo which remained practically unchanged over the time. The two inverted Vs are actually reminding of André Citroen's first area of expertise: mass production of double helically-cut gear teeth.

The Citroen logo looks like something you might see on an American cartoon soldier - two inverted Vs. Andre Citroen - imagine one of those old black and white photographs with an ancient man in a white beard - started in the motor trade by building gear wheels before branching out into the motorcar, and the twin chevrons << are meant to represent gear teeth in honour of the old engineer's early fettlings

The company's famous "double chevron" logo derives from André Citroën's early business in gear-cutting the company pioneered mass production of double helically-cut gear teeth, which mesh together in a chevron.

CIZETA

The Cizeta logo portrays a wolf's head, representing the Tiberian she-wolf that fed Romulus and Remus, the orphaned children of Mars who founded Rome. The blue and yellow colors are the colors of Modena, Italy (where the company was founded, though it's since moved to California). The word 'Cizeta' is the founders's initials, when spoken in Italian (his name was Claudio Zampolli).

Cizeta Automobili srl of Modena, Italy was a car architect set up in the backward 1980s by Claudio Zampolli (an Italian Ferrari dealer) and the almanac ambassador Giorgio Moroder.

The name “Cizeta” comes from the Italian accentuation of co-founder Claudio Zampolli’s brand (C.Z.). Moroder became complex into the activity if he took his Lamborghini Countach for a account at Zampolli’s garage. Their alone product, the Cizeta-Moroder V16T, featured a technically avant-garde sixteen butt engine fabricated up of two accompanying V8s administration a individual block. Styled by Marcello Gandini, the physique was conspicuously agnate to the after Lamborghini Diablo’s as Gandini aboriginal proposed the architecture to the again Chrysler-owned Lamborghini, which adapted the abstraction significantly. Gandini again brought the aboriginal Diablo architecture to Cizeta. The ancestor was the alone car to backpack the “Cizeta-Moroder” badge, as Giorgio Moroder pulled out of the Cizeta activity in 1990. The ancestor charcoal with Giorgio Moroder to this day.

CORVETTE

The modern Corvette logo is a variation of that designed by Robert Bartholomew (an interior designer at Chevrolet) in 1953. It features two flags, one a checkered flag and the other one featuring to icons, a Chevrolet bowtie logo and a fleur-de-lis. The fleur-de-lis was chosen since Chevrolet was a French name, and a fleur-de-lis is a French symbol meaning peace and purity.

The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car that has been bogus by General Motors back 1953. Today it is congenital at a General Motors accumulation bulb in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but in the accomplished it was congenital in Flint, Michigan and St. Louis, Missouri. The National Corvette Museum and anniversary National Corvette Homecoming are aswell amid in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The Corvette was born of the post-war sports-car boom, an optimistic time when nearly anything seemed possible, including the world's largest automaker building a two-seat "image" car. But despite the Corvette's initial impact as a sensational show car, the first production model was dismissed as more poseur than performer, and the so-called "plastic bathtub" was nearly axed from the Chevrolet lineup. Corvette came into its own, both on the road and at the racetrack, during the space-age Sixties. It flexed its muscle during the subsequently turbulent years of anti-war protests, political scandals, and civil unrest. It survived an onslaught of adversity throughout the Seventies. And while it welcomed the Eighties with its portfolio secure, the car's fortunes plummeted over the course of the ensuing decade. Again turning the tide, Chevy's legendary sports car was reborn in the late Nineties as a technologically advanced performance machine for the new millennium, and it enjoyed a well-earned resurgence in popularity. Then, the Corvette engineers unleashed the C6, the most precise and refined Corvette yet. They soon topped themselves with the next-generation Z06, a 500-horsepower track-bred Corvette that upped performance to new heights.