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!
The Tesla Cybertruck Logo Is A Drippy, Graffiti Mess That Makes No Sense
Let’s Start The Day By Thinking About The Avanti: Cold Start
Since AT&T Is Down, Let’s Look At How They Used To Make Their Vans Look Great: Cold Start
What these discussions actually needed was a designer with taste. Shame they didn’t know one at the time.
Ouch! I’d love to see what bleak ideas you’d implement!
Goth car site! Goth car site!
Umm.. I’d absolutely love a goth car site. It’ll be like the Tomboy Outback Steakhouse or Femboy Hooters of automotive journalism.
(what a sentence)
We desire strong content like
“44 Shades of Black: An Examination of the Darkest Automotive Paint”
or
“Window Tinting: How Much is Too Much”
Every car owned by Abby Sciuto in NCIS ranked!
I feel like I should Google if Femboy Hooters is a real thing. I mean, I know what femboys are, but that’s going to be a weird thing to look up in front of my wife. You know what, I’ve looked up weirder things before…
I think it qualifies as legitimate research.
Oh boy if you guys ever retain me as a staff writer y’all are in for some shenaniganry
I REALLY like the tagline “car culture’s best friend.” It’s kinda like Tom Joad’s “anytime you see a cop beatin up a guy, I’ll be there” speech from The Grapes of Wrath, but far less violent.
Glorious, glorious carbage.
Obviously you now have to use Carbage on something, right? Too good not to use, but wisely not the name of the site, lol.
Those are great taglines and I love how you’ve tried to keep things in the spirit of positivity, even though a really good one would have been “Suck it, J——k”
Ok, but did you consider Carbbage?
I’m glad to have been along for the ride the whole way, and even contributed terrible van content! I need to contribute more terrible van content soon!
Hell yes you do!
The world needs to hear about how the turbo diesel swap almost got me evicted and forced me to buy a house and become an adult who now works on his terrible vans from the discomfort of his own driveway.
Yes, yes we do.
Carbage? Yeah, that’s total garbage and trashy ha ha. It sounds like cars=garbage which is the opposite of what you’re doing. It would be ok for a column though, just not the name of the site. The designs are interesting and I’m glad you chose what you did. I’m so glad you started this site- it’s so awesome! I can’t believe it’s been 2 years already
Good thing you didn’t go with “Pelican free” for the tag line, cause I just got an ad for Pelican Parts in the Autopian TV box. Also, points for using the Skoda 110 Super Sport in a place holder pic.
Can there at least be a tshirt design that says “I drive Carbage.” with an autopian logo on it?
or “I drive Carbage so my SO doesn’t have to”
I could have sworn “for the love of cars” was the tagline.
Also, “The high beams in your face of motor journalism” needs to be used on investigative pieces. For the first one I vote “what Herbs are best to use on beer-can-engine-block-chicken.”
“For the love of cars” was the XCar/Carfection tagline and I always thought it was shit.
Those early sketches make me think of a cartoon, like a riff of the Fintstones/Jetsons set in the 50’s. No idea why.
Carbage absolutely should be a thing. It should be user submitted weirdo, half-finished projects that sprang from the fever dreams of builders of various skill levels.
I nominate this vehicle for the inaugural edition: https://www.facebook.com/share/QdLgEafBKwXQbHaV/?mibextid=kL3p88
Carbage is good branding. This should absolutely be launched as yet another article series about cars of questionable value. And, unlike those garbagey cars, the branding will be pure gold.
You should have told David that it wasn’t ‘protein’ but pro Tein (the Japanese aftermarket car suspension company).
Happy anniversary!
Sure doesn’t feel like 2 years on this side of the screen.
As I wear my Autopian hat anytime I’m not at work, the trial logos looked comically wrong 🙂
Logo nerds unite! I love this stuff.
I never made the Avanti connection, but the jet age connection came through loud and clear. The hand-drawn font is even period-correct. The stylized A just screams tail fin.
I thought it was the front of a Dustbuster van for a split second
‘Carbage’ needs to be a recurring segment where everyone agrees to let Jason off his leash and he can write whatever lunacy he feels like. The placeholder articles in the rough layout above are proof enough that this is a brilliant opportunity.
Also, Porsche used ham bushings because they’re self-lubricating.
I believe that is spelled Porkshe.
I KNEW there was a reason behind that racing livery!
Carbage was my pick, as it seems to describe most of DT’s fleet.
And purchases. YMMV.
Jason is on a leash?
We don’t kink shame ’round these parts.
Ah yes, The Autopian is the true legacy of Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company…and will probably last longer.
Glad you streamlined the end arrowhead of the Avanti script. Otherwise, it kinda gives off a Salt Life decal vibe, and we as a society seem to have plenty of that already.
I fully respect the Avanti influence. I knew the logo somehow seemed familiar but could never fully place it. Good work.
Am waiting for the letter of trademark infringement. From the ghost lawyers for Avanti.
If history serves, the new new new Avanti automobile company is probably forming as we speak.
Sounds like the new new new Packard I keep hearing about.
This may have alienated fuel-injection enthusiasts.
WAIT A MINUTE! I’m like 99.99% sure you launched on March 32nd, not April 1st… Speaking of revisionist history! :p
I hope you guys bring back Carbage as a segment! It would be a great partner to your shitbox showdown pieces.
Seconding Carbage.
Like most of Tracy’s Michigan cars they’re too good to be thrown away… they’re not really worth anything but there’s gotta be some kinda use for them, surely…(?)
This one would have forced the hands of all the other automotive publications. How many can say they’ve been pelican-free as long as this one? If they refuse to engage with rumors of pelican use, we will all be forced to assume heavy current reliance on pelican.
I still think it would be nice to highlight the fact that this is the only site offering damp car media, but it’s well-known at this point anyway.
Not to be confused with Moist Media.