A Terse Taxonomy Of Transportation Typography

Car badges! When was the last time you considered, I mean really hand-on-chin-cocked-head-slightly-nodding considered car badges? I’m going to bet it’s been too long. So let’s take care of that now, right now, and start the morning by taking some time to think about the typography of car badges, and the general categories they tend to fall into.

Of course, this is a very general sort of taxonomy – and I also just now learned that “taxonomy” usually refers to classification of living organisms, but I think we can still apply it to typography because language is alive, after all, isn’t it? Sure is!

Essentially, what I want to explore here is how there are some broad categories of car badge typography that tend to get used for very specific categories of cars, and these conceits seem to transcend brands, nationalities, and even eras, all thanks to some unspoken and usually unacknowledged agreements.

Let’s take a look at these! First, let’s look at what sort of badging defines a “luxury car”:

There’s a few crucial traits to luxury car badging: large letterspacing, so there’s a lot of room between letters, and those letters span a pretty good distance, horizontally. Also, serif typefaces are more commonly used to denote luxury, and usually those letterforms tend to be slim and elegant.

Newer luxury brands, less burdened by tradition, retain the large letterspacing of the general luxury badging, but have a bit more freedom to use san-serif typefaces, including somewhat novel and new typeface designs with more abstracted letterforms.

Cheaper, more mainstream cars tend to have blockier typography, very often italicized for a sense of motion, with minimal letterspacing. These, of course, can vary quite wildly, but the general traits of blockiness and directionally slanted letters are surprisingly common.

This sort of badging typography is of a very specific time and place: America, in the 1970s and early 1980s. This sort of script badging, looking like the typography used on a wedding reception invitation, was seen on American “personal luxury” cars and large land yachts and anything that needed that extra injection of “class,” the kind of “class” usually denoted by vast swaths of rich velour and dress shirts unbuttoned to navels.

Similar, but not exactly the same, are the “classic” class of car badge typography, which was script-heavy, but less fussy and ornate than the Land Yacht Brougham badging era. The type of script could vary a good bit, but a simple, bold script was a common throughline.

And finally we have a popular bit of modern badge typography, seen especially on SUVs and crossovers and pickup trucks and anything where the carmaker wants to convey a sense of rugged toughness: blocky letterforms, often with chiseled edges, sometimes italicized but not always by any means, and a certain kind of look that suggests the letters were punched into existence out of chunks of granite and raw beef.

There’s more categories, of course, but I think these cover a lot of the basics; if you look around, I think you’ll find most of the cars you see will fit into these categories. Also, anyone know what car I used as the generic base car for these illustrations?