Recently car man­u­fac­turer Cit­roën intro­duced a major rebrand, designed by Lan­dor. The rebrand­ing pro­gram included a com­plete redesign of Citroën’s show­rooms and all visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The adver­tise­ments cam­paigns are already changed in the Nether­lands. What I noticed was the usage of a cus­tom type­face instead of the type­face Futura/Gill Sans, as used before. The new cus­tom type­face is mainly used in upper­case. I have searched about the ori­gin of this type­face but noth­ing came up, so far.

Below you will find var­i­ous pho­tos taken with clear usage of the new type­face. I very much like how this type­face works, it has a very sleek and mod­ern look. Espe­cially the thin font vari­ant works really well. It attracted my atten­tion immediately.

The main rea­son the type­face is very eli­gi­ble because of its square glyphs, almost every sin­gle glyphs has the same dimen­sions, which makes it really read­able from a distance.

From a online PDF file I have learned that this cus­tom type­face has three font vari­ants and are named:

• Cit­roen
• Citroen-Bold
• Citroen-Light

From the press release:

Graphic prin­ci­ples for vis­i­bil­ity and con­sis­tency
CITROËN is intro­duc­ing new graphic designs, a sin­gle typog­ra­phy and a unique tone of voice to boost the vis­i­bil­ity and con­sis­tency of the brand. The new brand will uni­ver­sally reflect the Marque’s new sta­tus. The key colours are white, denot­ing open­ness and ele­gance, and red, to express vital­ity, together with black, grey and chrome, for sta­tus and power.

I have not seen many exam­ples using the low­er­case font vari­ant of this cus­tom type­face, so I searched inter­net and found this new folder using the type­face in upper­case and lowercase.

• This PDF folder of Cit­roën com­par­i­son guide will show you the usage of this new typeface.

Type­face Cit­roen: Uppercase

Type­face Cit­roen: Upper­case & lowercase

In my opin­ion the upper­case only text is much stronger than the low­er­case vari­ant, but it has a strong dis­tinc­tive look which seems to be bases on a com­bi­na­tion between Futura & Gill Sans. If any one knows who designed the cus­tom type­face please let me know.

Cit­roën Logo

Since its intro­duc­tion there has been many dis­cus­sions about the logo, per­son­ally I pre­fer the new logo above the old one because of its trans­parency look & feel.

Citroën’s new logo will help reignite inter­est in the iconic brand.

• Visit Brand New at Under­con­sid­er­a­tion for a full review and com­ments on the new Cit­roën logo.

Show­room Cit­roën Amsterdam

Design sketch new style

As you can see there shall be many changes in design for the show­rooms on the out­side, at the addi­tional infor­ma­tion you can find more sketches of the inte­rior of the new showrooms.

Addi­tional information

• Visit the design com­pany Lan­dor for more infor­ma­tion about their rebrand for Cit­roën, here you will find the PDF case.
• Wikipedia page about Cit­roën and its history.
• Review about the rebrand by Iden­ti­ty­works.
• Full review, press release and many artist impres­sion pho­tos at World­Car­Fans.
• The offi­cial web­site of Cit­roën, the his­tory web­site and addi­tional infor­ma­tion about Cit­roën.

Tell me what you think…

What do you think of the new type­face used for Cit­roën?
Do you think this new design look have a pos­i­tive impact on the sales?

Please share your thoughts, thank you in advance!