Copy Everything
Jaguarilicous
Who doesn’t like the new Jag car rebrand & concepts? Seems everyone. But is this really a lash-out of the anti-woke going against anything new and interesting happening in the world?
Well, let’s do an honest dress down from a pure designers perspective. I care very little about the window dressing when it comes to design, which is what those ads are. I care even less about the “attitude” or the “politics” involved in sales.
In all seriousness — if the LGBTQ+ identity politics activists are OK with companies around the world appropriating their cause to boost their sales using their real-life struggles to find acceptance in this world — I mean who am I to speak to that. I know every time real-life people’s problems are used to sell products it tends to backfire. Remember Kylie Jenner and Pepsi?
The Logo
As a designer I’m really not a fan of the type and logo rebrand for a few reasons.
First — I hate seeing unmotivated and bland design and we in the art world especially frown upon mixing capital and lower case letters. My graphic communications teacher, the legend of the business Alex Pajvančić used to call it “lazy design”. Every letter you put in a type needs to know why it’s there, he used to say.
We can clearly see that the only capital letters are J, G and U, and A’s are left as small caps. Why? The explanation from the designers is this:
The car maker says this ‘geometric form’ has ‘seamlessly blended upper and lower case characters in visual harmony’.
Harmony? You gotta be kidding me. Jaguar was modified Optima before it became an even more modified — but still Optima. And Optima is a type. A legendary type designed in the 50s.
With capital and small case letters that are different from each other. As in “A” is not “a”. These masterminds made a font without any knowledge of upper vs. lower cases. Yes, that small case letter “A” comes in the new font when you press shift+A. Yes. I know it’s a small case A. I’m sure they know that, too.
Now, this explanation of their is therefore (and in my opinion) a prime example of old school “marketing”, also known as total and utter BS.
So, Alan Peters stepped in and offered the company a brand redesign of their redesign to be compliant with both the company history, actually reflect what they wanted to do and preserve the IP, and not just ruthlessly destroy it.
His Tik-Tok video went viral for many wrong reasons, but at least one right. He did an excellent job, and his approach takes care of every issue that wasn’t taken care of by the marketing team working for Jaguar.
Don’t take my word for it — see it for yourself here!
Signum
I am really bothered with that Puma knock-off sticker they turned their iconic leaping jag into, but let’s be honest — that was always a bit of a thing. I’m a little grateful they at least (finally) flopped it.
The more serious issue is the cage. “The car maker announced the ‘Strikethrough’ — a barcode-like 16 horizontal lines of equal weight — which will be used across its brand image” — but which, and they were either blind or plain oblivious to the fact that — it totally looks like a cage. So— they stuck their iconic kitty into a goddamn prison of their own making.
The Car
But unlike their art & creative director doing a subpar job with the redesign — did their industrial designers at least nail it? That is the really important question considering this is a car company. So. Let’s see it.
Ok, the cars on a glance look pretty damn good. I love the lines, I love the style, I love the form and function.
But. Wait… I’ve seen this before… I’ve seen all of this before.
If you haven’t seen it before — this is a Rolls Royce Spectre.
This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. God help Jaguar if this controversial concept goes into production, I’m going to assume Rolls Roys will bury what’s left of them deeper then the Mariana Trench. Total, absolute car design fiasco.
Marketing Plan
And what about the marketing?
Well, even if they manage to come up with a different concept now that the stakes are higher then ever to stay afloat in the car business — I would love to know who’s actually gonna want to buy this.
Seems they’re going after the same luxury market makers like Rolls Royce, Bugatti, Bentley and even Tesla with their relatively wacky but still quite original Cybertruck, already hold a firm grip on. I mean Rolls Royce has an EV concept to own all luxury EV’s out already with their Spectre model for sure. Everyone else is playing catchup.
Conclusion
I think the rebrand was taken seriously to a certain extent, the investment was there, the money was there, too, but the execution ended up doing everything opposite then the intent. I simply feel the effort was not there.
This is very similar to the whole design AI nonsense out there, it is regurgitated, boring and lazy approach to an exciting and special thing design should always be. It’s like a bean counter with chat GPT was on this job, rather then a team of actual designer.
Brands should not be threading water in this very dangerous territory of populism and politics, as that’s a fight with mad people on both sides, and the biggest market is still, and always will be in between the embattled psychos.
Jaguar needs to revert on this rebrand and immediately find a new direction to shift to. There’s absolutely an opportunity to enter the space of super-luxury brands, but for inspiration they need to look elsewhere then wherever they were looking to come up with this rebrand.
Or — if they’re not willing to put the work in — they can also give it all up and change their branding to copy everything! People like honesty these days, so at least try and be honest.
