Sep 26, 2026
The McLaren Redesign Came From The Archive
McLaren’s new logo wasn’t created from scratch. It was found in the brand’s own archives, then refined for where the company is heading next.
That detail matters more than the redesign itself. The instinct in most rebrands is to clear the desk and start fresh, because a blank page feels like progress and looks decisive in a boardroom. McLaren went the other way and treated its own history as a source of raw material.
It’s a useful reminder that good rebrands don’t always mean starting over. Sometimes the answer is already somewhere in a company’s past, and the real skill is knowing what to look for.
Brand Identity
Rebrand
Logo
Why The Archive Beat The Blank Page
A rebrand that begins in the archive asks a different question: not what should we become, but what have we always been that got lost along the way?
Most identities don’t fail because the original idea was weak. They fail through accumulation. A tweak for a new product line, a simplification for a screen, a refresh under new leadership, and twenty years later the mark is a compromise nobody would have chosen deliberately.
Going back through the archive separates the two things that usually get confused. There is the core idea, which is often still strong, and there is the accumulated noise, which is what actually needs removing. Starting from scratch throws both away at once.
McLaren has an unusually rich vault to draw from: decades of racing liveries, badges, and typography made under real constraints, by people solving real problems at speed. That kind of material carries a kind of earned authority you cannot design in a week.
There is also a practical argument. Recognition takes years to build and seconds to discard. Recovering a form people have already seen means you inherit some of that equity instead of starting the clock again from zero.
The discipline is in the selection. An archive contains bad decisions alongside good ones, and nostalgia is a poor filter. The question is never whether something is old, but whether it still says the right thing about the company now.
It helps that racing archives are honest. Nothing in them was made to win an award, so the material tends to be direct, functional, and legible at speed. Those are the same qualities a brand needs on a phone screen, which is why old motorsport design often modernises better than old corporate design.
Found, Then Refined
Recovering a form is only half the job. It has to be refined for a context its original designers never had to consider.
A mark drawn for the side of a car in 1970 was never intended to survive being an app icon, a favicon, an embroidered patch, or a two-colour print on a technical fabric. Faithful restoration usually produces something that feels charming and performs badly.
So the work becomes editing rather than drawing. Weights get balanced for small sizes, curves get corrected for how they read on a screen rather than in paint, spacing gets tightened for modern layouts. Nothing dramatic happens, and everything shifts.
This is the part clients tend to underestimate, because there is no reveal moment. The value sits in decisions nobody is meant to notice: an optical correction here, a tightened joint there, a slightly heavier stroke so the shape holds at 16 pixels.
Typography does most of the heavy lifting alongside the mark. A recovered symbol paired with a contemporary, well-set wordmark reads as continuity. The same symbol paired with a dated typeface reads as a museum piece, and the difference is entirely in the execution.
The test is whether the result feels like the brand has caught up rather than changed. If people recognise it instantly but can’t quite say what moved, the refinement has done its job.
Colour deserves the same treatment. A heritage orange mixed for paint rarely survives a direct translation to a display, and matching the archive swatch literally can leave you with something that looks muddy in every digital context. Faithfulness to the intent beats faithfulness to the value.
How To Run Your Own Archive Audit
Before commissioning a redesign, spend a week in your own history. It is the cheapest research available and the most likely to produce something ownable.
Pull everything: early logos, packaging, signage, invoices, old adverts, internal documents, the first website. Lay it out chronologically and look for the moment the brand was most itself, which is usually earlier than anyone expects.
Then look for what has been quietly abandoned. A colour that was once used with conviction. A typographic quirk that got standardised away. A shape that appears in the first decade and disappears in the second. Those are candidates, not answers.
Test each one against where the business is going, not where it has been. If the recovered element only works as a tribute, leave it in the archive. If it can carry the next ten years, it is worth the refinement work.
For younger companies without much of an archive, the same logic applies to a shorter timeline. The early scrappy version of a brand is often sharper and more distinctive than the polished one that replaced it once everyone got cautious.
None of this is an argument against new work. It is an argument against assuming that new is the only direction available. The past can be a pretty good place to find something new, and in McLaren’s case it was sitting there the whole time.
Bring the team in for this. Founders and long-serving staff remember why choices were made, and that context often decides whether an element is worth recovering or was abandoned for a good reason.
One last caution: an archive-led rebrand still needs a strategy behind it. Recovering a beautiful old mark without deciding what the company now stands for produces a handsome identity with nothing to say, which is the same failure as a modern one.
FAQ
01
How does your brand design process work?
02
What's included in your branding packages?
03
Do you also design websites?
04
How long does branding take?
05
What do I need to prepare?
06
Do you offer ongoing support?
07
Can I make tweaks after delivery?
08
How do you ensure my brand stands out from competitors?
Let's Work Together
©2025
Contact Now
Book a discovery call
Let’s create something amazing together! Reach out I’d love to hear about your project and ideas.
or send a message
Sep 26, 2026
The McLaren Redesign Came From The Archive
McLaren’s new logo wasn’t created from scratch. It was found in the brand’s own archives, then refined for where the company is heading next.
That detail matters more than the redesign itself. The instinct in most rebrands is to clear the desk and start fresh, because a blank page feels like progress and looks decisive in a boardroom. McLaren went the other way and treated its own history as a source of raw material.
It’s a useful reminder that good rebrands don’t always mean starting over. Sometimes the answer is already somewhere in a company’s past, and the real skill is knowing what to look for.
Brand Identity
Rebrand
Logo
Why The Archive Beat The Blank Page
A rebrand that begins in the archive asks a different question: not what should we become, but what have we always been that got lost along the way?
Most identities don’t fail because the original idea was weak. They fail through accumulation. A tweak for a new product line, a simplification for a screen, a refresh under new leadership, and twenty years later the mark is a compromise nobody would have chosen deliberately.
Going back through the archive separates the two things that usually get confused. There is the core idea, which is often still strong, and there is the accumulated noise, which is what actually needs removing. Starting from scratch throws both away at once.
McLaren has an unusually rich vault to draw from: decades of racing liveries, badges, and typography made under real constraints, by people solving real problems at speed. That kind of material carries a kind of earned authority you cannot design in a week.
There is also a practical argument. Recognition takes years to build and seconds to discard. Recovering a form people have already seen means you inherit some of that equity instead of starting the clock again from zero.
The discipline is in the selection. An archive contains bad decisions alongside good ones, and nostalgia is a poor filter. The question is never whether something is old, but whether it still says the right thing about the company now.
It helps that racing archives are honest. Nothing in them was made to win an award, so the material tends to be direct, functional, and legible at speed. Those are the same qualities a brand needs on a phone screen, which is why old motorsport design often modernises better than old corporate design.
Found, Then Refined
Recovering a form is only half the job. It has to be refined for a context its original designers never had to consider.
A mark drawn for the side of a car in 1970 was never intended to survive being an app icon, a favicon, an embroidered patch, or a two-colour print on a technical fabric. Faithful restoration usually produces something that feels charming and performs badly.
So the work becomes editing rather than drawing. Weights get balanced for small sizes, curves get corrected for how they read on a screen rather than in paint, spacing gets tightened for modern layouts. Nothing dramatic happens, and everything shifts.
This is the part clients tend to underestimate, because there is no reveal moment. The value sits in decisions nobody is meant to notice: an optical correction here, a tightened joint there, a slightly heavier stroke so the shape holds at 16 pixels.
Typography does most of the heavy lifting alongside the mark. A recovered symbol paired with a contemporary, well-set wordmark reads as continuity. The same symbol paired with a dated typeface reads as a museum piece, and the difference is entirely in the execution.
The test is whether the result feels like the brand has caught up rather than changed. If people recognise it instantly but can’t quite say what moved, the refinement has done its job.
Colour deserves the same treatment. A heritage orange mixed for paint rarely survives a direct translation to a display, and matching the archive swatch literally can leave you with something that looks muddy in every digital context. Faithfulness to the intent beats faithfulness to the value.
How To Run Your Own Archive Audit
Before commissioning a redesign, spend a week in your own history. It is the cheapest research available and the most likely to produce something ownable.
Pull everything: early logos, packaging, signage, invoices, old adverts, internal documents, the first website. Lay it out chronologically and look for the moment the brand was most itself, which is usually earlier than anyone expects.
Then look for what has been quietly abandoned. A colour that was once used with conviction. A typographic quirk that got standardised away. A shape that appears in the first decade and disappears in the second. Those are candidates, not answers.
Test each one against where the business is going, not where it has been. If the recovered element only works as a tribute, leave it in the archive. If it can carry the next ten years, it is worth the refinement work.
For younger companies without much of an archive, the same logic applies to a shorter timeline. The early scrappy version of a brand is often sharper and more distinctive than the polished one that replaced it once everyone got cautious.
None of this is an argument against new work. It is an argument against assuming that new is the only direction available. The past can be a pretty good place to find something new, and in McLaren’s case it was sitting there the whole time.
Bring the team in for this. Founders and long-serving staff remember why choices were made, and that context often decides whether an element is worth recovering or was abandoned for a good reason.
One last caution: an archive-led rebrand still needs a strategy behind it. Recovering a beautiful old mark without deciding what the company now stands for produces a handsome identity with nothing to say, which is the same failure as a modern one.
FAQ
01
How does your brand design process work?
02
What's included in your branding packages?
03
Do you also design websites?
04
How long does branding take?
05
What do I need to prepare?
06
Do you offer ongoing support?
07
Can I make tweaks after delivery?
08
How do you ensure my brand stands out from competitors?
Let's Work Together
©2025
Contact Now
Book a discovery call
Let’s create something amazing together! Reach out I’d love to hear about your project and ideas.
or send a message
Sep 26, 2026
The McLaren Redesign Came From The Archive
McLaren’s new logo wasn’t created from scratch. It was found in the brand’s own archives, then refined for where the company is heading next.
That detail matters more than the redesign itself. The instinct in most rebrands is to clear the desk and start fresh, because a blank page feels like progress and looks decisive in a boardroom. McLaren went the other way and treated its own history as a source of raw material.
It’s a useful reminder that good rebrands don’t always mean starting over. Sometimes the answer is already somewhere in a company’s past, and the real skill is knowing what to look for.
Brand Identity
Rebrand
Logo
Why The Archive Beat The Blank Page
A rebrand that begins in the archive asks a different question: not what should we become, but what have we always been that got lost along the way?
Most identities don’t fail because the original idea was weak. They fail through accumulation. A tweak for a new product line, a simplification for a screen, a refresh under new leadership, and twenty years later the mark is a compromise nobody would have chosen deliberately.
Going back through the archive separates the two things that usually get confused. There is the core idea, which is often still strong, and there is the accumulated noise, which is what actually needs removing. Starting from scratch throws both away at once.
McLaren has an unusually rich vault to draw from: decades of racing liveries, badges, and typography made under real constraints, by people solving real problems at speed. That kind of material carries a kind of earned authority you cannot design in a week.
There is also a practical argument. Recognition takes years to build and seconds to discard. Recovering a form people have already seen means you inherit some of that equity instead of starting the clock again from zero.
The discipline is in the selection. An archive contains bad decisions alongside good ones, and nostalgia is a poor filter. The question is never whether something is old, but whether it still says the right thing about the company now.
It helps that racing archives are honest. Nothing in them was made to win an award, so the material tends to be direct, functional, and legible at speed. Those are the same qualities a brand needs on a phone screen, which is why old motorsport design often modernises better than old corporate design.
Found, Then Refined
Recovering a form is only half the job. It has to be refined for a context its original designers never had to consider.
A mark drawn for the side of a car in 1970 was never intended to survive being an app icon, a favicon, an embroidered patch, or a two-colour print on a technical fabric. Faithful restoration usually produces something that feels charming and performs badly.
So the work becomes editing rather than drawing. Weights get balanced for small sizes, curves get corrected for how they read on a screen rather than in paint, spacing gets tightened for modern layouts. Nothing dramatic happens, and everything shifts.
This is the part clients tend to underestimate, because there is no reveal moment. The value sits in decisions nobody is meant to notice: an optical correction here, a tightened joint there, a slightly heavier stroke so the shape holds at 16 pixels.
Typography does most of the heavy lifting alongside the mark. A recovered symbol paired with a contemporary, well-set wordmark reads as continuity. The same symbol paired with a dated typeface reads as a museum piece, and the difference is entirely in the execution.
The test is whether the result feels like the brand has caught up rather than changed. If people recognise it instantly but can’t quite say what moved, the refinement has done its job.
Colour deserves the same treatment. A heritage orange mixed for paint rarely survives a direct translation to a display, and matching the archive swatch literally can leave you with something that looks muddy in every digital context. Faithfulness to the intent beats faithfulness to the value.
How To Run Your Own Archive Audit
Before commissioning a redesign, spend a week in your own history. It is the cheapest research available and the most likely to produce something ownable.
Pull everything: early logos, packaging, signage, invoices, old adverts, internal documents, the first website. Lay it out chronologically and look for the moment the brand was most itself, which is usually earlier than anyone expects.
Then look for what has been quietly abandoned. A colour that was once used with conviction. A typographic quirk that got standardised away. A shape that appears in the first decade and disappears in the second. Those are candidates, not answers.
Test each one against where the business is going, not where it has been. If the recovered element only works as a tribute, leave it in the archive. If it can carry the next ten years, it is worth the refinement work.
For younger companies without much of an archive, the same logic applies to a shorter timeline. The early scrappy version of a brand is often sharper and more distinctive than the polished one that replaced it once everyone got cautious.
None of this is an argument against new work. It is an argument against assuming that new is the only direction available. The past can be a pretty good place to find something new, and in McLaren’s case it was sitting there the whole time.
Bring the team in for this. Founders and long-serving staff remember why choices were made, and that context often decides whether an element is worth recovering or was abandoned for a good reason.
One last caution: an archive-led rebrand still needs a strategy behind it. Recovering a beautiful old mark without deciding what the company now stands for produces a handsome identity with nothing to say, which is the same failure as a modern one.
FAQ
How does your brand design process work?
What's included in your branding packages?
Do you also design websites?
How long does branding take?
What do I need to prepare?
Do you offer ongoing support?
Can I make tweaks after delivery?
How do you ensure my brand stands out from competitors?
Let's Work Together
©2025
Contact Now
Book a
discovery call
Let’s create something amazing together! Reach out I’d love to hear about your project and ideas.
or send a message