Toyota (Europe)Copied

On 20 July 2020 Toyota Motor Europe introduced a reworked logo and typography for its communications. The cars kept the existing badge; the change covered every communication touchpoint instead.

The headline move is subtraction. The emblem of three ellipses is reduced to a simple flat 2D design and the Toyota wordmark goes, which Toyota justifies on the grounds that the emblem is already well known across Europe. Around it sits a new sans serif, Toyota Type, meant to keep things clear and consistent across business units, plus a mostly monochrome palette with a red accent. The brand architecture was tidied too, with name changes, consistent typesetting and standard logo lock-ups.

The work came from the in-house branding studio of the agency network The&Partnership, as part of its full-service relationship with TME. The agency says the studio spent 12 months on it with the Toyota project team from July 2019 and packaged the guidelines in an online toolkit for anyone handling the brand in Europe.

Dezeen led with the missing name, and consumers noticed too. Horizont reported a YouGov survey of more than 2,000 Germans in which the new logo fell flat, mainly because the wordmark had gone.

Dezeen pushed the agency on whether flat car logos were just a trend. Dan Beckett argued the opposite: twenty years ago it became fashionable to render logos as shiny 3D objects, even at Apple, and on small screens all those bevels and gradients turned into grey smudges indistinguishable from one another. Flattening was the logical fix for a problem another trend created. Dropping the Toyota name, the agency and carmaker said, simply acknowledged that European drivers already recognised the three ovals. It is a fair argument, and a rare one made in plain language.

Dropping the name is a confident call that only a handful of carmakers could make, and Toyota is plausibly one of them. Going flat and grey also gets rid of the chrome-effect badge that never looked right on a screen. The risk is blandness, and the red accent does most of the work keeping it from looking like a corporate template.