ŠKODA unveils its new logo, colours and future identity

After many years, ŠKODA is changing its logo. The new design emphasises the name, while making strong use of two new green communication colours.

30. 8. 2022 Škoda World

“With the new corporate identity, we are taking the look of the entire brand to the next level. It’s not only our product portfolio that is evolving: our customers are too. And we see this as an ideal opportunity to adapt the brand to a decade of transformation and modify its look and feel to match the needs and expectations of our customers. Our new corporate identity underlines our modern and distinctive design and clearly demonstrates our approach, which is primarily digital. I am confident that our customers will love it!” remarks Martin Jahn, member of the ŠKODA board of directors responsible for sales and marketing.

One factor driving the change was the NEXT LEVEL ŠKODA Strategy 2030, which steers the Czech carmaker more towards electrification and digitalisation. The brand identity, including the logo design and overall approach to branding, had to adapt to these two trends. “The increasingly intensive use of the logo in various digital formats has led us to redesign the logo in two-dimensional graphics that are easier to recognise and more distinctive on displays, as well as in print, than the existing three-dimensional design,” says Petra Mackeová from the company’s marketing department, explaining the principles behind the changes.

The new visual identity will be modern and highly visible.

Evergreen identity

In addition to the new graphic design, the branding has undergone other changes. The company will now use the ŠKODA name and traditional winged arrow in a ring more separately, with the name becoming the main communication tool. This typographic logo will appear not only on the rear of ŠKODA cars, as it has in recent years, but also on the front.

The new logo on the front of the car

In order to make it more expressive, the word ŠKODA was given a new look with an integrated “hook” accent over the letter S, working with symmetry and a combination of curves and edges. “The accent was a challenge for us: from a global perspective it tends to be confusing for most of our customers. In the new form, this symbol will be integrated and blend in with the symmetry of the logo, while customers in the domestic market and some others will still recognise it in the lettering,” says Martin Pavlík, the second member of the marketing team that prepared the new brand identity.

The new logo and its colour scheme work better with mobile devices.

The symbol of the winged arrow has also been altered, although not so fundamentally. The logo has been simplified at first glance and will now be rendered in a flat form, allowing the Czech carmaker to work with the colours more expressively. “This simple two-dimensional version is more effective on mobile devices especially and allows flexible integration into different formats. With this change, ŠKODA is responding to the shift towards even greater digitalisation of communication. The new identity also includes two new shades of green, emerald and electric green. Few brands have the colour green as ingrained in their DNA as ŠKODA. The new shades maintain the link with history, but also refresh the design and allude more strongly to electromobility,” says Petra Mackeová.

165 design suggestions and more than a year of work

The team working on the new brand identity was very small, but it received support from right across the entire car company. The work took over a year and initially the team worked with a total of 165 proposals, from which a shortlist of three gradually took shape. ŠKODA then put these versions through rigorous testing, involving over 2,200 respondents from the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Norway, India and Israel. Based on their feedback, the logo design now unveiled was the winner.

Petra Mackeová and Martin Pavlík developing the new logo