Logo design is not easy. At all. You have to distill the entire essence of an organization down into something instantly identifiable, easily reproducible, appealing, eye-catching, everything. It’s far more challenging than I think most people realize. And when it’s not right, everyone can tell, immediately, almost innately. If you don’t believe me, just look at Jaguar’s new logo – and the associated new brand-image campaign – and look at the reactions it’s inspiring, almost none of which are positive. This is feeling like a logo disaster.
Jaguar making a radical and bold change is absolutely a good thing, don’t get me wrong. The brand has been stagnant for some time now, and in desperate need of some sort of reboot. Sure, they have a fantastic history and a legacy of truly iconic cars, but that doesn’t help them sell new cars, which I’m told carmakers enjoy doing. So the idea that Jaguar needs to make a dramatic change is something I absolutely agree with.
I’m just not sure the change should be whatever this is:
Oh boy. There’s a lot there, isn’t there? Let’s just start with the logo:
Now, on some basic design level, I don’t hate this at all; I think the rounded forms are friendly and clean, and the mixing of upper and lower case is playful. It’s approachable and clean, slightly 70s-retro as well. It would be a fantastic logo for, say, a maker of fun budget consumer electronics or perhaps a frozen yogurt brand.
But for a car? For a Jaguar? No.
I mean, I think the old logo was definitely in need of an update; the typography felt stale and dated, and the jaguar itself – the “leaper,” was a bit too complex for an effective logo. It was fine for what it was, but I do agree that an update was in order.
That said, it’s hard to imagine something that feels more wrong than what Jag decided on. As I said, it’s not terrible graphically, but we have to consider what this “device mark” (that’s what Jaguar calls the wordmark logo) feels like and reminds us of, visually, because I hardly think it works as a car brand attempting to compete with Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, and Bentley.
Here are some other logos that feel very visually similar to the new Jag logo:
So, we have Nintendo’s line of little toys that interact with video games, the stylized typography used for a sci-fi movie about gigantic worms and desert-dwelling drug addicts, and the design of the typography on those Bloomingdale’s bags my Aunt Margie used to always have.
None of these feel like “premium vehicle” to me, electric or otherwise.
Plus, where’s the cat? Why would you get rid of the leaping feline from the logo? That’s the best part! To be fair, the new brand identity does have a place for the leaping jag, shown as a “makers mark” on a striped background that they call “strikethrough” and seems to refer to horizontal line design motifs.
That’s a bit better, and could certainly work well on some sort of rectangular grille. Jaguar also is showing a sort of monogram-like makers mark, too:
Again, not a bad design (if you can get past a sort of monogram that’s JaguaR) but it still doesn’t feel very Jaguar, even if Jaguar wants to make a new idea of Jaguar. I know it’s easy to criticize, because I’m doing that right now so I know, but I still think this logo could have been much, much better.
Here, I’m going to take five minutes to just show you roughly what I mean:
That’s a literal five-minute effort, and I’m not saying this is perfect or even good by any means, but I feel like it captures modernity and Jaguar-ness better than the “device mark” Jaguar put out. Using that new more angular leaper would make it better, but I don’t feel like spending another five minutes doing that. You can imagine it, right?
Okay, that’s just the logo. Let’s get into the brand identity stuff shown in that video I embedded up there. You know, the one with this wacky crew:
Okay, so here’s my big problem with all of this: for something that says “copy nothing,” this is some incredibly derivative stuff. This kind of bold, colorful couture, these saturated-color-monochromatic backgrounds, it’s not new or bold, it’s almost the default go-to when some organization wants to prove how bold and edgy and daring they are.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a little experiment to try. Grab a sample image of one of these Gautier-ish-looking models and do a reverse image search. Let’s try one with this vivid friend here:
…and the results:
There are many, many similar earlier examples of this aesthetic, going back about 20 years or so. There have been plenty of looks like this, the ruffles, the color, the fit, the expression, the overall look. This is not new ground that’s being tread, this is the easiest, most worn path to making people think new ground is being tread.
Some of these references go back even further. Take Temu Tilda Swinton here with her sledgehammer:
She’s not breaking any moulds there; she’s snuggling into a mould that was first used to cast a brand identity back in 1984.
And I think that may be the real problem here: this whole identity and campaign wants so desperately to be seen as shocking or new or novel but it just isn’t. It’s pandering and lazy and while I respect that Jaguar wants to shoot for something artier and unexpected, this just isn’t it.
This kind of artful shocking, using striking, unusual-looking models and visuals that arrest and surprise certainly can be done to sell cars. Citroën figured it out decades ago, for example:
Seriously, can you imagine going on a road trip with this guy?:
After about an hour of listening to his atonal music and listening to him complain about every fucking billboard you pass and refusing to play word games with you and eating his smelly mung beans, noisily, you’d want to ditch this scarlet bore at the first Sheetz you stopped at.
The tone isn’t innovative, it’s smug and elitist and while, sure, that’s part of the Jaguar identity, this is stupidly and derivatively smug and elitist. I suppose there will be people who will say that at least we’re talking about Jaguar now, but I’m not sure that’s so great. Because everyone seems to be talking about how they don’t want whatever Jaguars come out of this.
There needs to be a new idea of Jaguar, no question. Whatever this mess is, though, is not it.
Jaguar, if you want a do-over, I think everyone is okay with that.
It’s almost as if someone at the ad agency watched a commercial for a fashion or perfume brand and had their minds blown. Seriously, I cannot remember when was the last time I saw a perfume commercial that made any sense or gave me an idea of what I would be buying.
Exhibit A: What is even going on here? Why is the lady crying gold?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDrCCj2UCaw
Exhibit B: You know what, screw it, let’s do a supercut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpIOeQ86Lls
Jaguar, buddy, don’t do this!
God I hate perfum ads.
Over here they are on constantly during the run up to Christmas. That one with Jonny Depp makes me assume it smells of drunk pirates and shame.
All of them just make me add that company to the list of wankers who will never get my money.
On entirely the other side of the marketing coin is Alpinestars. I own a set of Alpinestars bike leathers, bike boots, FIA race boots, and FIA race suit, two MTB tops and five pairs of Alpinestars gloves, and I have no idea why I chose them.
OMG, I’m having flashbacks to this:“Sprockets”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZR9SA5pOg
These are obviously people who were supposed to be in a Devo video, but accidentally showed up at a Herbie Hancock video shoot instead, and then realized it was 2024 and that they look ridiculous.
Wow, that’s shagadelic in a “what if Austin Powers was a moody teenager?” sort of way. These guys look more like they’d vandalize your artwork than steal it.
The circle with the two letters (why JR? Seriously?) reminds me of the really old Mazda one.
The new logo, if you can call it that, is bad. Period. No further notes. The old logo needs a change but this ain’t it!
It looks like a logo you’d see on some lame Temu knockoff purse
Jaguar making baby strollers now?
https://uppababy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/UPPAbaby_grey.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b1/Britax_logo.svg
https://www.thepregoexpo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Baby_Jogger_Logo.jpeg
Should be titled: A collection of bad hairstyles and clown suits.
I don’t mind the monogram. (I am a sucker for ambigrams.) Everything else can get tossed.
Jag-offs. This was created by jag-offs.
Monogram should be JO instead of JR.
Oh FFS, Jaguar. What happened, did someone consume too many edibles while watching Logan’s Run? Seriously, first they drop the F-type and now this. As a life-long fan of the brand I really want to like the big sedan they’re teasing, but now I’m guessing the real design is going to be an egg with wheels, or some other type of sad, rolling disappointment.
As to that graphic, what the shit? Someone discovered their compass and made a circle, then probably went ooooOOooooo, it’s, like, a tire, or a wheel, ya know… cars have wheels, and… yeah, lets make all the letters like that! Weeeeee… Circles!!! Round and round and round and round and round and round. It’s the new JaguaR!
I liked their old logos – the cars themselves always felt sport-ish, yet stuffy somehow as well and so was some of their imagery. Particularly the cat’s head logo on the steering wheel and sometimes found on the wheel caps – way overdetailed. I didn’t even realize what the hell it was for awhile on my first XJ6. When it finally dawned on me that a big mean cat was staring back in my face, I felt like I earned something. This new logo looks like it would be right at home on the side of a kid’s bumble seat.
So yeah, let’s get rid of the F-Type, the one Jaguar that still resembled the name, take a year off from making cars in general, just take All the drugs, and come back with this half-baked marketing campaign of non-sensical regurgitated “We’re doing it d1fF3rAnt” tropes for the masses to consume. “Delete Everything”… yes, please keep deleting Jaguar: get a big fucking eraser, take a drill to your hard drives, turn your design studios into smash rooms and do whatever else it takes to get everyone there back to the drawing board doing literally anything other than what they’ve been doing because whatever the hell that is currently isn’t working.
That may be about enough internetting for today – seems a little early, but it might just be time to go sit in my XK8 out in the garage and have a pint or three.
Even how the “slogans” are constructed with deliberately bad grammar (the first instance of which I can think of at the top of my head being Apple’s “Think Different” campaign) are more the norm now than anything different. It’s a trend that boils my piss. They’d have been way edgier and different if they’d actually used real sentences.
Jason, did you ever do an article about when the department of transportation change the highway signage from Highway Helvetica to Clearview font? Or might’ve been the other way around. I read that article.
Supposed to say, I would read that article
This is the beginning of the end for Jaguar. Wtf are they thinking with that logo?
Land Rover has so much RIGHT going on with it now, how can Jaguar be getting it so wrong?
I mean, given that they didn’t plan to have product at this point, I might suggest this is somewhere in the middle of the end of Jaguar.
There has been a lot of “we don’t actually know what to do with this car company we have” with Jaguar for the past several years.
I know this is a very Q1 2024 reference, but it’s giving ‘We have diverse at home’.
Something got crossed up here….why is everyone sharing a video of an ad from Emily in Paris and talking about Jaguar?
But seriously, I feel there are two critical things that Jag must balance while they take a sabbatical from making cars:
Keep people talking/thinking/noticing Jaguar while they are off on holidays. This ad is certainly doing that, technically I guess…..Build interest for their return. Massive failure. This does the opposite of interest. Jag has a year of foreplay ahead, but instead they……you know, I’ll just stop this analogy right there. We should be getting excited for cars to come instead of cracking jokes about Grace Jones and Benetton.
Jaguar needs a serif font, heavily weighted at the bottom with a continuity point for the end of the J and the middle of the R.
I’ve designed enough logos to see this as a complete fuckup. It just seems like nobody who gets high enough into levels of success can design a logo or icon anymore. It’s been ten years of things getting progressively worse, with a combination of flattening and simplification brought on by Google’s horrible Material design language.
When did Benetton buy Jaguar?
Yeesh,
That’s a big yikes my dude.
This is so shockingly bad that I can’t even comprehend it. Disagree with your take on mixing cases – it is just never appropriate and is subtly offensive to literate people. I get that the contract was inked to put this together. But whoever decided to put it out to the public instead of scrapping it made a huge mistake!
Nothing like a particolored cadre of shiny, dour people to sell me things.
I like how at the end of the video they all exit the screen and reveal….nothing! I expected to see a car there, but this reminded me that they are not really making any cars right now! Brilliant, very representative of the brand!
Reminds me of when Lagunitas took over making Newcastle Brown Ale. Lost the Plot.
As a former owner of a Jaguar XJ8 Vanden Plas, which I owned for 14 years, Jaguar has definitely lost its way. However this isn’t the right direction to go!
That video is downright pretentious and superficial. It was like I was watching a commercial for some snobby fizzy drink . _:(´ཀ`」∠):_
Do better Jaguar.
Gonna pile on here and say yeah, this branding is completely opposite to Jag’s current image. Jaguars are sinister and the cars of evil henchmen, that rounded typeface is way too friendly. When I first saw it I thought it was for vaguely flavored seltzer water.
looks like the same font as the old GAP logo
https://www.hatchwise.com/resources/history-of-logos-gap-logo
An abomination.
Adrian Clarke, what say ye?