The meaning behind Mazda’s wing -shaped logo – Jalopnik

The Mazda MX-5 from 1999 is a great birthday gift, because it marked the 10th birthday of the Miata and brought some subtle but welcome changes about first-generation models. The 1999 Miata said goodbye to pop -up headlights and hello against a little more output, and the company also hit its new logo on the outside of the car. Actually introduced the year before – in 1997, because the Miata from ’99 was released in ’98 – the new logo contained a stylized “M” in a circle, with the sloping parts of the letter massaged to look like two wings, and the verticals that are delivered by the curves of the circle.

Those wings were also not only meant to look cool. Mazda Says that they represent the “drive of the company to pursue improvements and continuous growth with flexible thinking, creativity and resilience.”

And they continue to appear on a recent trademark Mazda logo that could represent the next phase in the evolution of the design. The updates are quite small and are centered around the wings, which are now less wing with right lines. The circular frame is also somewhat picked. To be clear, the Mazda trademark was for Japan, but a similar logo has already been shown in China, at the Mazda Arata SUV concept. It is therefore unlikely that it is limited to Mazda’s home country. And while the future of the logo is still restless, we let the past look quickly.

Mazda follows his roots back to 1920, when Toyo Corkyo Kogyo Co. Ltd. was founded in Hiroshima, Japan. As you might guess, it made cork products, which, yes, was far from building a bona fide luxury SUV today. But among the early board members was an engineer named Jujiro Matsuda, who was more interested in machines than in Cork. He became president of the company in 1921 and eventually transformed it into the automaker we know today.

Before that, the company used a logo that was a thick red circle with two short horizontal lines that crossed the middle, not completely in the middle. Again by Mazda, this “Toyo Kogyo’s wish to contribute to the world through Engineering and the determination to constantly strive forward”. “Cork” was from the company name in 1927 and it was transferred to the production of his first three-wheeled vehicle in 1931. The debut of the “Mazda” name and logo-the name in a chic font-followed in 1934.

Only in 1959 did the automaker designed a logo for a real car. That is because the first actual Mazda car did not come to the Mazda 360 Kei car from 1960. It showed a chrome circle with a small “M” that in turn was attached to the circle by extending the outer lines of the letter.

Over the years, Mazda has adjusted the appearance of the logo, with one of the more interesting versions that appear in 1936. The design was inspired by the emblem of the city of Hiroshima, with three wavy lines to echo three streams of the Ota River Delta, where the city is located. Mazda turned the three lines into three stylized Ms for Mazda as a motorcycle manufacturer.

Speaking of engines, the design of one of the most famous engines of the automaker also helped to influence the design of the logos. Mazda is known for its rotating style engines that depend on triangular rotors instead of pistons for combustion. The so -called “Reuleaux” curved triangular shape became the frame for the “M” logo of Mazda with the Mazda Cosmo Coupe, a rotating sports car that went on sale for the first time in 1967.

And unless you think that Mazda was only concentrated on logos with letters, let’s take a look at Mazda bathing in the early nineties. That is when Mazda introduced a pure graphic badge where two “wings” are raised to the point that their tips meet, creating a circle that should represent the shape of the sun. Although it had to be changed, so it would not look that much like the Renault logo of that time, this badge is remarkable for appearing on the last few years of the first-gen Miata which is certainly a great choice for your dream summer cabriolet.