Hi Sander,

Thank you for this well written overview of the new Citroen branding.

Maybe they had a new typeface designed because they found that they needed to stand out from the Futura/Gill Sans crowd. I see those typefaces everywhere!

I also like how tone of voice is part of their new corporate communication. It shows that it’s not just about the visuals anymore, but about how the brand communicates holistically to its target markets.

Thank you Eivind - for your comment, appreciated! I have browsed many Citroen folders and saw many usages of various typefaces like Futura and Gill Sans. It was indeed time to stand out and create guidelines for how to use a typeface in visual communication. Always interesting to see how one (brand guideline) can achieve such a thing for a company as large as Citroen.

So true about the visuals of the cars, I believe Landor took the design beyond the car and brought it back to the brand Citroen.

If you have time, search for the book “The Brand Gap”, a beautiful presentation on how design can close the gap between sales and communication.

The type does work well in the street signage photographs you captured. The clean, modernist lines remind me of Avenir, my current favorite typeface.

Personally, I’d love to see an auto company use a serif in their branding materials just to be different. Even the luxury marques (Bentley, Maybach, Jaguar, Rolls Royce) have embraced the sans serif. No one wants to be seen as staid, I guess.

Thank you LC - for your comment. Indeed it seems to have more of a Avenier touch, great notice.

The only car brands with slab-serif that I could find where: Lancia & Maserati.

Below you will find a comparison of the various typefaces.

Wow - that is one GORGEOUS font! Very tasteful - just enough curl or ligature to make it flow better than Futura.
Love it!

Hi Media Designer - thanks for your comment. I also like this custom typeface very much, but take a look at the kerning. I personally don’t like the spacing between “CI” for instance, at the lowercase I have seen also some strange kerning.

Citroen sure gains some very valuable “brand points” with this new rebranding.
Thanks for sharing this overview with us Sander!

Great article, and that is an amazing typeface. Light, easy to read and enough difference to any other out there. (Nice comparison chart as well) I love the curves on the N and R, but certainly a bit of additional kerning could work well.

Hi Mihai Daniel - thank you for your kind words, appreciated. The rebrand of Citroen is one of the first to use these kind of design elements in their visual communication. Hope to see other car manufacturers to follow.

Thanks Xander - for your comment, appreciated. Here in the Netherlands at this time of writing you can see the ads at almost every corner of the street, and every time I find it a good & modern typeface. At Google Trends you can see a spike in the beginning of this year. Maby this rebrand will do something good for the car industry.

Does anybody know who designed this typeface?

Great article again Sander. I noticed the rebrand a while back at Fontanel. I am definitely preferring the new over the old, much clearer and transparent.

The typface is also great, truly liking the subtle bend in the R and the N.

Did they refreshed the signs in our hometown yet? (Or do they need to hire Baumann Sign?

I love this typeface. It looks like a slightly altered Gill Sans and it has a certain ‘Schwung’ which makes it dynamic.

I think the architecture of the Citroen Office in Paris is very impressive. The front facade is one big logo. The architect didn’t want the name ‘Citroen’ on the building.

The facade app it´s a tribute to op-art?

Wow, what a wonderful clean sans-serif type, i love it!!

I love the Typeface Citroen, very elegant and to apply on web design projects.

Hi Sander,

nice article, I really love the new typeface. The ‘curved’ R and N give the typeface more energy, more speed … Very nice!

The ‘webby 2.0’ icon/visual is not one of my favourites though. Keep up the good work, ciao ….

The typeface is stylish and has a classic modernist feel, the same cannot be said for the updated logo, it is in my opinion appalling. It attempts to project a contemporary technologically advanced sentiment and fails. It masquerades these qualities with the rendering and the forced curving of the lettering. It is pretty hard to beat the simplicity and beauty of the previous long standing chevrons, even the type, as it too is classic.

Sorry designers : (

Whoops, they should have stuck with the old one. The new one looks like it was made in 2002.