There are few brands as iconic as Cadillac. The Cadillac crest and the cars that bear it have been a globally recognized symbol of personal achievement for over a hundred years.
As Cadillac enters its next century of setting ‘The Standard of the World’, new challenges and new opportunities prompted a re-evaluation of the existing brand identity. Electrification is revolutionizing the Cadillac lineup. Expanding global markets require both a cohesive system, and a variety of expressive possibilities. And the brand’s next generation of drivers have a whole different attitude towards luxury and mobility.
Mother Design created a new visual identity that marries the electric energy of the Cadillac’s future with new takes on the swagger, futurism, and sense of occasion that have been core to the brand since the beginning. Leading the way is a new Cadillac Crest, simplified of embellishment and ornamentation to scale seamlessly in modern media, and mirroring the illuminated emblem on the latest Cadillac vehicles. In partnership with Colophon, we designed Cadillac Gothic, a new bespoke type family inspired by the iconic width, scale, and presence of Cadillac design. Color has been taken out of the Crest for the first time, and is instead channeled throughout the identity in new ways, creating a vivid atmosphere and energy. In a bold step for the brand, the Crest and new Wordmark move independently of one another, creating a dynamic variety of compositions, framing a new brand-wide point of view on photography, styling, and art direction.
The entire creative process was designed to bring together global teams across all disciplines, from executive leadership, to retail specialists and to automotive. We facilitated in depth immersion sessions with these key teams in order to understand the functional challenges of the existing system and what the new system needed to solve for. With the Cadillac global team, we rallied around a desire to engineer a more modern, better functioning brand, one that could unify Cadillac’s global presence, recapture and reimagine the iconic values at its core, and set the brand up for another chapter of defining the Standard of the World.
