The decades-old design trick that makes every EV logo look the same
Maybe you've noticed it while driving down the road. The chrome logos. The sleek sans serif fonts. It can be hard to tell one electric vehicle brand from another.
There's a reason EV brands like Tesla, Rivian, BYD, Neta, Jaguar, and Zeekr have become a sea of sameness, and it all comes down to a single influence: Many of today's most technologically advanced cars owe their aesthetic to a decades-old vision of the future.
Most EV brands use a font that includes cutouts, slashes, or entire missing segments. This is a font style called 'stenciling,' and if it looks inherently futuristic, that's because it's most often used in science fiction media.
'It's shorthand for the future,' says Stephen Coles, editorial director and associate curator at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, who also authors a blog called Chromeography about the history of car branding.
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