The Verizon IndyCar series unveiled a new logo today, however, it looked a little bland. Uninspiring. Not lilac enough. Clip-arty. So, we fixed it.
IndyCar’s actual new logo includes Verizon’s boring new wordmark, which looks like a dressed-up version of a completed to-do list item instead of an actual logo. It’s not terrible font-wise, but it definitely looks like the work of a design student who said, “I don’t dare use Helvetica like everybody expects, so I’m going with Neue Klasse Grotesk to throw people off!”
Then, of course, it got combined with the late nineties vibe of the IndyCar logo. Remember when parodies of Major League Baseball’s red and blue silhouette man were a new, clever thing, readily available on snarky “humor” t-shirts at malls everywhere? Ah, those were the days.
Devoid of its color, the IndyCar logo just doesn’t work anymore. Fortunately, our own Jason Torchinsky came up with an improved render of IndyCar’s new logo that fixes all of the problems here:
See how much better that looks without the side lines for the wheels? If they’re going to simplify the Verizon logo, they need to move IndyCar’s stylized silhouette into the twenty-first century, too.
Sure, Verizon may lose its equal-size wordmark and their logo’s signature check placement, but three lines of equal-sized, bunched-up text was pretty difficult to read. Putting “IndyCar Series” in larger print gets right to the meat of what this actually advertises.
Torch didn’t add any lilac in, but I’m certain that this would look just as fine rendered in one color (as a good logo should), entirely in Puffalump bunny butt purple.
All things considered, I guess it’s an okay logo as-is. It could be worse.
Photoshop credits: Patrick George/Stef Schrader (top), Jason Torchinsky (bottom)
Contact the author at stef.schrader@jalopnik.com.