I love logo design. Before I was America’s eighth-least tolerable Automobile Dipshit, I was a graphic designer, and I really got excited by logos. Good logos are all about reduction and recognizability. They should be as legible when rendered in full-color on a Jumbotron as they are when stencil spray-painted on a wooden shipping crate. They’re design distilled to its absolute bare essentials, which can also mean that when they go wrong, they tend to go really wrong. Like Kia’s new logo, introduced in 2021, which seems to be so confusing to understand that 30,000 people every month Google “KN car,” because Kia’s new logo looks more like that than it looks like KIA. Luckily, it’s easy to fix, as we’ll show here with our official Autopian Technical Service Bulletin.
This eye-rolling and hilarious fact has been reported on by a number of outlets, but I think I first saw the number of confused searches in this tweet:
the new kia logo is so unreadable that at least 30k people a month search for the "KN car" ever since its debut pic.twitter.com/jRj25JoAPp
— Ashwinn (@Shwinnabego) November 17, 2022
I remember when Kias with the new logo started to appear, and I think the only positive thing I heard was that the new look reminded people of fond memories of Nine Inch Nails:
So, there’s that. But that doesn’t change the fact that Kia’s new logo absolutely reads like “K-backwards-N.” I mean, I get that it’s fun to eliminate the crossbar of the A so it looks like a lambda, but in the context of this design vocabulary it just doesn’t work.
That’s not to say it’s not an improvement in some ways; the old Kia logo was, at best, boring. Here, let’s look at the history of Kia logos:
Man, what a journey! I kind of like the happy flag-waving of the 1986 logo, and that inverted-Q thing is pleasingly simple and cryptic. I think the real mystery here is why Kia didn’t just adopt the Korean “flying K” logo for global markets, since that is abstracted enough to not suffer from alphanumeric legibility problems. And it looks good, sort of evoking lightning strikes or knees bent mid-run or a pair of bird profiles in flight. It’s not bad!
Of course, a logo does not need to spell out a carmaker’s name; plenty of logos don’t, but we equate them with the brand just fine. Think about Mercedes’ tri-point star or Subaru’s stylized Pleiades or Peugeot’s lion or Audi’s four rings of the old Auto Union or a leaping jaguar, and so on. But what makes those logos different is that they’re not actively confusing. This isn’t about a non-wordmark logo, it’s a problem of a logo made of letters looking like the wrong fucking letters. If the Mercedes-Benz star looked like a P or something, it’d be weird, for example.
But, no, that’s not the path Kia chose. Instead it went with the confusing not-KN logo, and here we are. But you know me, I’m the kind of guy who’s going to change the 1157s in your taillight rather than curse your darkness. So, with that in mind, I think I have an easy solution to Kia’s logo problem. Just this minor tweak:
See? Easy! Now it reads like KIA again! And you don’t lose the stylized look or anything, it just breaks up the ᴎ-shape in the logo so it can read like two separate, recognizable glyphs. Even better, this change was specifically designed to be able to be retrofitted to all affected Kias on the road! In fact, our very own crazy designer of things, The Bishop, spent some crucial procrastinating time mocking up the packaging for this service part and the required technical service bulletin and inevitable recall notice:
Look at that, Kia! We got your back! Now go call your supplier of adhesive-backed-chrome-look things and tell them you need a little hyphen-shaped deal and get the ball rolling.
I’m personally a fan of the ones that look like a sideways Mazda logo.
Maximum credit for finding a way to make this a safety issue,haha
You know,honestly i’m kind of used to it now,and like it as it is.
I wonder- if they made your suggested change, how many would *still* get it wrong and read it as KLA?
Or just get a silver Sharpie and apply the fix yourself.
You’re a feckless, slack-jawed imbecile if you can’t see that it says KIA
The original Ridgeline logo had some problems like this with the first two letters. I always though that it looked like Fudgeline at a glance. So for me, all Ridgelines are now Fudgelines.
To me, the current KIA logo looks like a penis.
I should talk to my therapist.
Your sarcastic wit is off the charts. I love the follow through with the TSB and recall letter. Fanfuckingtastic!
I actually created an account for the sole purpose of saying FUCK YES. I fucking hate that logo with the heat of a thousand suns. I agree with TheHairyNug that the crossbar probably can’t be floating—probably best to attach it to the ending down stroke of the A
Another solution would be a short kickback at the bottom of the A’s right leg.
Adding back the crossbar to the A is definitely a great idea. It’s infinitely more readable. It’s a little awkward with the thick lines of the main letters and the little tiny crossbar, but that’s a small price to pay given the difference it makes.
Maybe this is part of a bold new marketing strategy which is part of Kia’s next-gen cyber digital transformation though. People google “KN car”, Google captures their interest, and then they are served with ads for Kia for the rest of their lives. Deliberately misinformed consumers are the new informed consumer?
Another bad one – the F-150 badge where the F is a cutout and perfectly in line with the 150, so it looks like 3150 at first glance.
The middle line of the “A” probably can’t be floating
I am old enough to remember when the IBM logo was considered the gold standard of graphic design. Simple, legible, tells a story. Get off my lawn!
I have always seen it as KIA, but I don’t think it’s a good logo. Your fix makes a big difference.
My wife hates the logo so much, she refuses to even consider a Kia. I think your fix would be terrific.
1. Thanks for at least taking a unique approach to the copy-paste “story” that everyone else is running.
2. Major miss from a statistical standpoint….while 30k seems big, there is no point of reference as to whether it is statistically significant. If 20mil search “Kia” or permutations thereof, then 30k is nothing. In addition, it is likely bad data to begin with. Anyone else know of any car-related brand that might spur a search for “KN Car”? One that back in high school your buddy swore would add 25hp just from an air filter swap? Oh, yeah….K&N. Further, just looking at the spike and assuming is was due to the logo change is a jump. What about the broader searches for Kia? While not looking at the same tool, Google trends shows an uptick for Kia searches around the same time that has since maintained slightly higher trend stats than prior to march 2021. I could go on, but I need more coffee….mini data rant over…..
Yeah, but if you look at the actual trend data there is a lot to suggest this is a Kia problem. K&N has been around for a long time and there were very few searches for it prior to the new logo, and if you look at the trend site directly you can see that a lot of the searches are specifically for Kia cars, e.g. KN Telluride or KN K5. People are obviously confused.
That said, the searches are actually tailing off lately, so maybe people are learning that it’s a Kia logo? I guess you’d have the same problem with a more abstract logo too.
I think that the Korean market logo is the best. If people go all out to get JDM stuff for their Hondas and Toyotas, we should do KDM badges and logos for our Hyundai and Kia.
I assume one issue with the Korean market logo is the risk of confusion with Lexus’s logo.
I see a “K” and a cyrillic “I” (И)
Wow, the Autopian doing the important work of the Auto industry. I LOVE that you did this, from Jason’s article to the Bishop’s part and bulletin work. This is the golden nugget that lures me to this site daily. Bravo.
You should sell this bit in the shop, complete with the fake letter and everything. It would have made the perfect stocking stuffer for any Kia-owning family member. Or just about anyone, really.
I always see it as KNVA…
Given how long it takes to book in for a simple scheduled service at our chronically understaffed local KN dealer, I don’t think my wife’s KN Rio GT Line will have the faulty logo rectified in a timely matter.
But if the Autopian Merch Team (if there is one) made New Kia Logo Correction Kits, I’d definitely buy one and correct this egregious manufacturing defect myself!
I always thought it was a fancy or clever way of incorporating an M because it would stand for “Kia Motors” … However, it seems very few countries consider them Kia Motors – so my theory is foolish.
For the first week or two after the current logo was unveiled, I was right there with you, Torch.
“Why does it say K-backwards-N?”
But then it grew on me, and now I just think it looks sleek and cool. I don’t mind it at all. I just feel bad for all the people who bought their Tellurides and Sorentos one year too early and got stuck with the last oval badge, which now looks old-fashioned by comparison. I wonder how many of them are having them rebadged with the new logo.
Also, if Kias weren’t so eye-catching, nobody would be making that google search.
Isn’t the cool thing about this logo is that it works(almost) both rightside-up and flipped over, like a y-axis palindrome? That’s what pleases me about it, anyway.
I can’t see the N, though
Backward “N”.