What the work is
Renault adopted the diamond as its emblem in 1925. This brief follows three turning points: its adaptation to angled car bonnets, the 1972 redesign and the flat identity introduced in 2021.
Both accounts used here come from Renault’s own magazine, so they describe the company’s view of its logo. Renault’s account of the earlier marks: the first logo, in 1900, was two entwined Rs in an Art Nouveau medallion, used primarily on internal documents, and in 1906 the medallion was replaced by an image of the car that won the first French Grand Prix, shown inside a gear wheel.
How it was made
The diamond followed a circular badge that covered a horn grille. In 1972, Victor Vasarely and his son Yvaral rebuilt it with parallel lines, removing the Renault name. The Renault 5 first carried that version.
Renault says it placed a front-end logo on its vehicles for the first time in 1923, a round grille with the name in the centre, split in two by a central line and tailored to its “Alligator” bonnet. The grille was functional because regulations required the horn to sit at the front behind a metal grille. The round logo soon took on more angular contours better suited to bonnets with two plane faces and a central dividing line. The diamond appeared alongside the round grille from 1924, on the front of the 40-CV Type NM executive tourer, and was definitively adopted in 1925. At first it was used exclusively on luxury sports vehicles, identified by the name Stella from 1929.
Renault ties the 1972 change to its Art & Industry policy, set up in 1967. The company wanted the diamond wider, with cleaner lines and more prominent, and says Vasarely, the founder of op art, working with his son Yvaral, created a logo based on parallel lines; it calls the result “both simple and intricate.” Renault’s account adds that the diamond went inside a yellow square in 2004 and that, from 2015, it became larger and more vertical on the grille.
What works
The outline supplies continuity while the internal drawing changes. This makes the sequence useful for studying how an identity can retain a recognizable structure without freezing every detail of its appearance.
What does not
Recognition is not the same as legibility in every application. Closely spaced lines, a metal vehicle badge and a small screen icon pose different problems; a historical sequence alone cannot demonstrate equal performance across them.
What it influenced
The 2021 redesign returned to lines through two optically intertwined diamonds. Renault described its flat treatment as suitable for animation, connecting the badge’s graphic history with moving digital applications.
Design Director Gilles Vidal says a new version was studied from 2019, because the previous emblem, created in 1992 and redesigned in 2015, was beginning to date, and because the logo now had to work across many fields, notably digital. The new logo carries no signature or typography. He describes the line treatment as telling a story of a path between two lozenges, intertwined by an optical effect, and notes that Renault had already used lines to iconize its logo in 1946, 1959 and 1972. The mark was first integrated on the Renault 5 Prototype, where, Vidal says, the enthusiastic reception convinced management to launch it. Renault’s article counts the diamond as redesigned eight times before this version, nine with it, and quotes Vidal saying the entire range would carry the new emblem by 2024.
Is it worth your time
Worth studying as successive responses to changing media. Compare the 1925, 1972 and 2021 versions at the same size, then examine what the move from a physical grille to an animated mark changes.
