JaguarCopied

Jaguar was in trouble before it touched its logo. The BBC reported that sales fell from 180,000 cars in 2018 to 67,000 in 2023, making it the weakest part of Jaguar Land Rover. JLR's 2021 Reimagine strategy set out to move Jaguar upmarket as an electric-only brand, with cars costing roughly twice as much as before. JLR chief executive Adrian Mardell admitted the brand had not always been distinctive enough in the previous decade, and managing director Rawdon Glover told Design Week he expected 80 to 90 percent of future buyers to be new to Jaguar. In late 2024 JLR stopped selling new Jaguars in the UK, a deliberate pause Glover called breathing space before the relaunch.

The creative lead was Professor Gerry McGovern, JLR's chief creative officer, who framed the new philosophy as Exuberant Modernism and built it on Copy Nothing, a line from founder Sir William Lyons. Inside JLR, brand design director Richard Stevens told Design Week that his in-house team was briefed to create a device mark, a strikethrough, a colour palette and two maker's marks.

Revealed on 19 November 2024, the identity has four parts. The device mark replaces the boxy capitals with a rounded geometric wordmark, lowercase except the G, with mirrored j and r forms; Jaguar described it as modernism in symmetry and simplicity. The strikethrough, a set of parallel lines, is meant as a language-free signature striking through imitation. Colour is built from painters' primaries, yellow, red and blue, always shown with texture or movement. The maker's marks are a reimagined leaper and a roundel monogram of j and r. The growler head badge was dropped.

The launch went wrong before it went right. A 30-second teaser showed models in bright clothes and no car. Elon Musk replied, Do you sell cars?, and Glover answered that Jaguar would love to show him, inviting him to Miami. Glover later condemned the vile hatred and intolerance directed at the cast, and Donald Trump attacked the ad again in 2025. On 2 December 2024 at Miami Art Week, Jaguar unveiled the Type 00, a pink, long-bonneted concept not intended for sale, alongside installations by British artists in the Miami Design District. The BBC found reaction to it as divided as to the teaser.

The aftermath kept the story alive. Glover argued that the attention was the point and that Jaguar should be polarising rather than vanilla. Reports in 2025 said JLR had put its global creative account, held by Accenture Song, under review; JLR declined to comment on any campaign involvement. In December 2025, weeks after PB Balaji became JLR chief executive, Autocar and The Guardian reported that McGovern had left the company; JLR said it was untrue that it had terminated his employment.

As design, the identity is better than its reception: the wordmark is genuinely distinctive and the system is coherent. As a launch, it asked people to judge a luxury car brand with no car in sight, and that decision, not the letterforms, made it one of the most argued-over rebrands of the decade.