Rebranding an American Icon

There are few brands as iconic as Cadillac.

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.

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.

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.