Here’s Our Two-Year Anniversary Look Back At The Evolution Of The Autopian Logo And Its Secret Origins

As a designer, one thing I always love to see is how familiar designs like logos actually grew, evolved, and how they originated. Maybe it’s an act of unmitigated hubris for me to assume The Autopian logo and overall design/look is something so familiar to you that you’ll be interested in its evolution, but I’m going to hope so and show you some things anyway. Because it’s our second anniversary, and I found a bunch of old files! Let’s dig in, and see the behind-the-scenes magic!

[Ed note: Guess what! To do all of this we need help from readers like you. The good news is that we’re doing a special 20% discount on annual memberships or upgrades today! Just use the code mustang2yearanniversrary or click this link and it’ll apply the code automatically – MH]

Before I get to the logo, we should talk a bit about the name itself, because let me tell you, it could have been very different and, frankly, much, much worse. David and I had been trying to come up with names for our hopeful new venture for a while, and when we partnered with Beau, in addition to all the other wonderful things Beau brought to this project to make it actually real, one of those things was the name.

Beau had the name in his back pocket for who knows how long, and once we heard it we knew it was the one. It just felt right, and with “the” in front of it, it felt like a publication, and without the article, it feels like a descriptor of our readers. Autopians read The Autopian!

You want to know the name that David and I had as our front-runner? Carbage. [Ed note: This is revisionist history. I hated Carbage. Jason kept pushing for it. –DT] Yes, that’s right, Car plus garbage felt like a good name to us. We kept coming back to it. Thankfully, we had Beau. Carbage!

Okay, so once we settled on the Autopian name, I immediately started thinking about a logo. I love the rigors and restrictions of logo design, where you have to be able to make something easily identifiable at all kinds of sizes, in all kinds of contexts, that still somehow conveys the essence of whatever your organization is about. The name has a bit of mid-century, jet-age optimism, so I started to think about car badging of that era, and remembered the Studebaker Avanti’s bold logotype, with its directionality, speedy-feeling strokes, and how the crossbar of the A becomes this arrow that shoots through the whole badge:

So, with the Avanti script as a starting point, I began to play. This is from the Illustrator file I used to make the logo:

These first passes stuck fairly closely to the Avanti style. Working out how I wanted a similar arrowhead to work was tricky, but I kept at it. I even tried chrome and colors:

The color palette is important, too, of course. The multicolored backgrounds had some appeal, but was too much. I settled on a small palette of aquas and a highlight color of red, which we stuck with:

I tried to develop the letterforms a bit, and I like the kind of loopy feeling of it all, but the legibility just wasn’t there. At small sizes, it was just a mess. I needed to simplify things. So I tried this:

More legible, but not really better. I missed the directionality of the Avanti logo and a certain flow-iness. This felt too static. But I kind of liked basing the letters on one particular baseline shape. I couldn’t find any fonts I liked enough to use, so, like before, I just made the letters by hand. Here’s what that process begat:

And that finally got me to a result I liked! I started with upright letterforms, all starting with a rounded-corner rectangle. But it was too static, so I skewed it, made the leading A more dramatic, and simplified the arrowhead. That N gave me some fits but once I let go of the need for all the negative space to fit the same shape, it worked.

The new A also worked alone, which was good, because the wordmark logo is so wide, sometimes we’d need a more compact way to identify ourselves. I stuck the A on a circle, and was happy. David said he wanted something that made it more car-obvious, so I also made the wheel-based one. I tend to use the wheel logo more than any of them now!

I also needed to figure out what the whole site would look like, and started that before we’d even finalized the logo, as you can see here:

We knew from the start we wanted a simple, reverse-chronological layout. We knew we needed ads but didn’t want to clutter the page with them. We considered some classifieds (we may come back to that yet!) and we knew we wanted big featured stories up top.

This clunky rough layout eventually turned into this:

We never did get that awesome-sounding story from G.Gordon Liddy up top there, sadly. With just a few changes, though, this is still the basic layout of the site today!

We also really wanted to come up with a tagline for the site, but never quite settled on one. We did brainstorm a whole bunch of them, many of which I really like:

I mean, “Car media like you want it: Damp” is objectively gold, right? “Pelican-free since 1979” seems like it’d be good, but we can’t prove it and it’s not car-related enough. Also, I’m pretty sure we’ve used some pelican in making the site. “Pro-car pro-fessionals pro-vide pro-tein” I think has a certain charm, but David felt weird about the protein part.

“Car culture’s estranged great aunt” is pretty sexy, right? “The concept of a burrito but a car website” focus-grouped well, but it just turned out everybody was hungry. “A website for 1995 Dodge Stratus Owners (and every other car ever made) is pretty accurate, but it’s too long.

Taglines are hard.

It looks like we picked this one for this teaser image:

I guess that one is okay? We haven’t used it all that much.

I’m so amazed and delighted that we’re still here, two years on. It’s still so early, and yet I feel like we’ve come so far. And we still have so much more to do and write and show and experience and everything. I’m happy I have these old files because just seeing them gave me a reminder of all those feelings of excitement and trepidation and uncertainty and hope from when we were starting all this.

Here’s to many more years with you! And I hope seeing some of the design process was actually interesting to someone other than myself!

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