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After rebranding with three-dimensional, chrome-effect logos in the 80s and 90s, carmakers from Nissan to BMW are reverting back to flat designs to keep pace with the digitally led world. We’ve rounded up seven examples.

Simplified, flat logos replicate better on screens and in miniature as app icons, prompting designers to ditch the three-dimensional (3D) logos that were popular among automotive companies in the 1980s and 90s.

These logos had shiny chrome-effects that mimicked how the emblem would look like in metal as a car mascot. This style, called skeuomorphism, has fallen out of favour since Apple began to prioritise flat design in its software updates.

Car brands are now reverting back to mid-century style flat design for their logos in an attempt to better align themselves with the style set by the tech company. Changing back to two-dimensional (2D) logos is also a way to offer better readability on digital platforms.

“With the advent of digital brand touchpoints and especially small mobile screens, all those fiddly bevels and gradients meant the logos became little grey smudges, indistinguishable from one another,” explained Dan Beckett, lead designer of Toyota’s latest logo.

“I don’t see [flat design] as a new trend,” Beckett added. “I see it as the logical solution to a universal problem created by a different trend.”

Read on for our selection of seven car brands that have recently rebranded with flat design:

MINI

MINI was one of the first car brands to switch its logo to a flat design, which it unveiled in June 2015. The new, minimal logo is a 2D, monochrome version of the double-winged symbol from the 1980s.

Like most of the other automakers flattening their brand identities, the flat version of the emblem will be used on screens and paper, while the MINI vehicles themselves will keep the 3D, chrome-style iteration of the logo.

The logo redesign was accompanied by a new serif font called MINI Serif. The two updates, together, were launched to make it look like MINI was “entering a new era,” according to head of design Anders Warming.

Volkswagen

Formerly 3D and also featuring a chrome-effect, Volkswagen‘s old logo was flattened and reduced to its basic elements in September 2019. This was the brand’s first major change to its visual identity since it adopted the 3D design in 2000.

The new logo has a 2D design, with the letters V and W encased in a circle, all coloured in one shade of dark blue.

This move was coordinated with the launch of its first fully electric production car, the ID.3, which was the first car to bear the new logo. Like MINI, Volkswagen claimed that its updated “digital-first” branding would mark the “start of a new era”.

BMW

Earlier this year in March, BMW rolled out a minimalist redesign of its logo, introducing a new, transparent backdrop. This was the first time the German car manufacturer had overhauled its emblem since 1997 when it was changed from 2D to 3D.

The new design sees the distinctive black ring that surrounds its blue and white centre replaced with a transparent band, meaning that it will take on different colours and patterns depending on what background it is placed.

The rest of the logo was flattened, ridding of the shadows on both the black ring and the blue and white inner circle. It was first featured on Volkswagen’s electric Concept i4 vehicle, which gave the ring a metallic bronze colour.

Citroën

Citroën changed its logo in 2016, losing the shine of its two chevrons and the distinctive red colour of its name, leaving a flat, monochrome design.

The French automaker was slightly later than other car brands to jump on the 3D bandwagon, not replacing its formerly flat logo created in 1977 with a raised, metallic design until 2009.

As the company explained, its new 2016 logo was designed to increase its visibility. “This choice of graphics is in line with the current ‘flat design’ trend for simplifying signs,” said Citroën. “Using just one colour it offers new graphic opportunities and gives the brand new impetus.”

Nissan

Japanese car brand Nissan recently updated its logo earlier this month, when it launched a flat and more stylised version of its previous emblem, which boasted a raised, life-like effect.

While the company name has been kept at the centre of the logo, it no longer sits inside a raised box, as the former rectangle-overlaid-on-a-circle look has been simplified into two basic lines.

The new logo is more “digital-friendly” according to the automaker and was the first time it had changed its visual identity in 20 years. The last overhaul saw the brand swap its original logo for a 3D version.

Audi

German automaker Audi made the move from 3D to 2D in 2017, flattening the recognisable four, interlocking rings that were formerly designed to look like they were made from reflective metal. Again, this decision was made to reposition the brand as “digital-first”, and to improve its readability across online platforms.

Two decades prior in 1995 Audi has made the switch from a flat logo design to a three-dimensional style, – only to go back to a 2D design 22 years later.

Most recently, the car brand has launched an interactive tool that allows people to change the thickness of the rings in a bid to make its visual identity “more accessible”.

Toyota

Toyota‘s Europe division was the most recent carmaker to have flattened its logo, the design of which it unveiled earlier this week, which comprises a simplified, 2D emblem made up of three overlapping ovals.

The Japanese auto company first changed its logo from 2D to 3D in the late 1980s, but recently reverted back to the old flat design to ensure “longevity in a digital world”.

This new visual identity also involved the removal of its wordmark, as a marker of Toyota being “one of the most recognisable brands in the world”.

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American artist Janet Echelman has installed a woven sculpture composed of blue fibres on a site in Florida with history that traces back to the American Civil Rights Movement.

Bending Arc is a permanent work suspended above a grassy park overlooking the Pier District in St Petersburg, Florida.

The piece is 72 feet tall (21.9 metres) at its peak and measures 424 feet in width (129.2 metres). Its shape constantly changes as it ripples with the movement of wind.

Echelman, a Florida native, took cues from the colours and patterns of beach umbrellas illustrated on old postcards and from marine barnacles that live beneath the pier to design the woven sculpture.

In her research she came across information about the site’s historical significance during the Civil Rights Movement, which began in the 1950s, as a location where local citizens protested segregation. The outcry led to the 1957 US Supreme Court ruling that allowed people of all races to use the municipal beach and swimming pool.

“I wanted to celebrate the courage of the people whose work led to the freedom and inclusion we can all experience today at the new pier,” Echelman told Dezeen.

Echelman has titled the work Bending Arc to reference words said by Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.

“The title Bending Arc is important to me, and it embraces the goal of the new pier to welcome everyone – all ages, all backgrounds,” she added.

“The colours of my sculpture reflect this – hues of blue like the sky in a full gradient from white to black.”

Viewed from above the piece has a rectangular shape composed of geometric orbs. Its centre is filled in with blue- and white- striped threading to match the pattern used on parasol designs.

To create the piece the artist shaped polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), an engineered fibre, into a thread-like textile. The coloured strands are braided together and wrapped around sewing bobbins to form a mesh netting that is knotted by hand.

An additional set of netting, composed of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene fibre, is woven together by knots, following a method popularised by mariners. The mesh textile is 15 times stronger than steel and is attached by hand to the other piece.

On site cranes were used to install and pull the roping taut. The piece is designed to withstand Ultraviolet exposure and retain its strength under winds of 150 miles-per-hour (241.4 kilometres-per-hour).

At night low-energy LED lights project tones of pink and purple across the sculpture making it glow.

Echelman hopes the sculpture offers visitors a sensory experience and an appreciation for nature and humankind.

“My hope is that each person becomes aware of their own sensory experience in that moment of discovery, and that may lead to the creation of your own meaning or narrative,” she said.

“When I look at the sculpture, I see a physical proof of humankind’s ability to work together in shaping our physical world – and to ‘bend the moral arc of the universe.’ It’s a reminder of our interconnectedness on every scale.”

Janet Echleman has completed a number of woven sculptures in her career that have been installed all over the world.

In 2018, she hovered a pink and red textile over Madrid’s Plaza Mayor in celebration of its 400th anniversary, and in 2016 she hung a similar design hung over an intersection in London’s Oxford Circus.

Photography is by Brain Adams, unless noted otherwise.

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Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel has teamed up with workplace designer Industrious to create rentable offices in its guest suites to cater to those who are working from home during the coronavirus pandemic.

With many offices still closed due to the city’s coronavirus lockdown regulations, the Industrious at Wythe Hotel project is intended to offer remote workers with access to flexible, clean and well-equipped workspaces.

Available for rent by the day, each office is located in one of the Williamsburg hotel’s former loft-style bedrooms with access to a private outdoor space. They are designed to cater to up to four people with Wi-Fi, access to printing services and a smart TV.

Bedroom furnishings are replaced by sit or stand wood desks and rexford chairs from furniture rental provider Feather, and black metal table lamps.

The finishes complement the room’s industrial aesthetic of exposed concrete floors and brick walls.

“Together with Industrious, we are offering remote workers a safe and comfortable place to be productive and escape the confinements of their apartments for a moment,” said Wythe Hotel owner Peter Lawrence.

Industrious at Wythe Hotel provides an example of the way that traditional working lifestyles could be disrupted following the pandemic.

In its earlier stages, Dezeen editor Tom Ravenscroft said “the great work-from-home experiment” would mean remote working would no longer be unusual.

“The companies that best navigate the future of work are going to be the ones that put choices in their employees’ hands, including the choice of where and how they do their job best,” said Industrious co-founder Jamie Hodari.

“At Industrious, we think this is just one example of the types of innovation you’ll begin to see in our industry and beyond.”

Other architects and designers have similarly forecasted ways that offices will change. British interior designer Sevil Peach said they will get smaller, while Form4 Architecture co-founder Paul Fero believes that cubicles will become more prevalent.

Perkins and Will interior design director Meena Krenek said offices will balance “physical and virtual” work and proposed physical spaces for meetings and large gatherings. Global firm Woods Bagot also created diagrams of workplaces during coronavirus that merge working from home and office.

Wythe Hotel has made the office spaces available until 31 August. The boutique hotel provided accommodation for medical workers from Woodhull Hospital in Bushwick and NYU Langone Hospital in Sunset Park during the height of the city’s pandemic, an experience it said has enabled them to develop safe practices.

“By working in collaboration with doctors and nurses on-property during the shutdown, our staff is well-equipped to ensure that all guests are staying in a healthy environment,” it said.

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Guerewol Festival 2019 is a Student Winner in the Visual Communication category of the 2020 Core77 Design Awards competition.

As a rebranding challenge, Kenneth Kuh, a design student at ArtCenter gambled on creating a visual system a pretty unexpected event for the exercise that ultimately led to a winning design awards project.

His winning visual identity was designed for the Guerewol Festival, an annual courtship ritual competition among the Wodaabe Fula people of Niger. Guerewol is a fascinating cultural practice that involves, as Kuh describes it, as “ornamented young men dancing the ‘Yaake’ in a line, facing a young marriageable woman, sometimes repeatedly over a seven-day period, and for hours on end in the desert sun.” The ritual is more traditional than other events we tend to associate with the word ‘festival’ in modern times, but it does manage to attract tourists aware of the practice each year. Kuh wanted to envision a brand identity for the event to attract an even wider global interest in the Wodaabe’s unique culture.

As a winner in the Visual Communication student category of the 2020 Core77 Design Awards, the visual identity received some outstanding reviews from this year’s jury team. Jury Captain & Pentagram Partner Eddie Opara said of the project, “What can I say? Incredibly expressive in every part—from the aspects of the shape, form, composition, typography, movement, suspense, how it connects into the interactions in videos.” Champions Design Founding Partner Bobby C. Martin Jr. added to the sentiment, saying “for me, the typography was something that wasn’t just typed out. It was something that had a lot of craft and attention paid to it and that’s part of what made it so unique.”

For Kuh, the main inspiration behind this project was simply joy. “The idea of emphasizing on the ‘pleasure’ nature and making it into a tribe was further expanded into a logo mark that resembles a welcoming smile,” Kuh writes in his Core77 awards entry. The bright graphics and bold typography exist as reflection of the Wodaabe people and to emphasize what the festival is all about: love and happiness. Kuh says his design is meant to “encourage [people] to move their bodies around and practice celebration of love and beauty in the desert…and eventually achieve pure happiness.”

In a recent video interview with ZDNet.com, Belkin VP of Industrial Design and two-decade company veteran Oliver Seil shared a few interesting thoughts on the future of work and the research Belkin has done with their design team and workers within their own company to learn how their office is coping with the shift. You can watch the video in full here:

We’ve cut a few takeaways from the interview that illustrate some interesting insights into the future of work and upcoming design trends related to the topic that might be helpful to designers taking part in shaping this new future.

1. Working from home is more productive than we may have previously imagined

If Seil’s team at Belkin is any indication, it seems for many that WFH is here to stay:

“We find that productivity is really, really high from home. That has to do with the basic idea that you have a bit more freedom how to design your day. Some people start earlier, they end later, they have some more flexibility during the day. We would be foolish not to take some of this newfound learning about productivity at home into the future. I think it’s clear that you can be very productive at home and you need to be in the office maybe only part of the time.”

Working from home will likely evolve from a circumstantial necessity to a brand new normal, and designers ought to be ready to cater to these new workflows. As Seil mentions at another point in the interview, “Most people only want to be in the office for specific things. Few people need the technology there.” Which may make you ask, what’s even the point of having an office space then?

2. Despite the acceptance of a new WFH culture, designers’ work in quarantine is suffering

“We’ve done quite a bit of introspection and research into what people are looking for in the office: Why are they coming to the office? Why is going to the office an attractive idea? While some folks can exist pretty much all the time working from home and it’s not a big problem, we find that the design team really suffers to some degree from the lack of the serendipitous collaboration and also plan for collaboration. Designers need to be communicators. Designers need to be collaborators. Designers need to work with one another and the feedback loop of working with another person is an incredibly joyful and productive exchange, so the idea that as a designer, you need to be very hands-on, so coming back to the office for us is vital to collaborate and to really push each other forward in our thinking about what we are working on.”

As designers, many of you in our audience can contribute to the dialogue expressed here—does collaboration and product development feel especially difficult in this new work from home structure? What are some ways in which companies can develop remote work systems that feel stable and productive for the designer set? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

3. WFH means companies like Belkin are focusing on consumer technology products that ease workflow and efficiency according to an individual worker’s needs

Seil notes that the pandemic has shifted the team’s perspective on important focus points for future product development, as demonstrated here:

“The home office is now a multiple of many compared to the size and reach of the headquarters offices, so now, instead of having one large office building for a headquarter, now you have hundreds and hundreds of mini offices. They all need to be equipped according to the user’s needs, so we’re finding that dock products are incredibly important because you want to avoid the amount of cables you have and the multitude of power adapters. We are finding ways to articulate the value proposition of products that relates more easily work from home in a more compact space, and be more ergonomic, all of those things matter. We want [our products] to be approachable and easy to use and we want to make you feel smart when you use them.”

4. How do you key into future trends? Don’t focus on products—instead, invest in learning as much about emerging technologies as possible to find future solutions.

“As a technology company, what we have accepted as one of our realities is we have to be really knowledgeable about future technologies and that’s a bit separate maybe from future devices. The devices would incorporate new technologies and we often really have no clue what’s happening until we hear it like everybody else does. The way we deal with that is we invest heavily in just being knowledgeable about all future technologies. We have teams of experts who could speak knowledgeably and be part of the industrial forums and the technology forums where these things are developed.”

True to most good designer’s nature is an inherent curiosity and desire to learn more and adapt their work to emerging fields within the industry. This quote is a great reminder not to get caught up in the latest technological fad, but instead to keep an ear to the ground about what’s happening next.

A solid tip, and might I add, a perfect tie-in to shamelessly plug our Core77 designer forums that are full of helpful industry advice.

You can read Core77’s interview with Seil in 2018 about the design of the True Clear Pro here