Norton Rebranded

Bikes

Twitter sometime shores up some interesting points. This morning came the news from Creative Review that London agency Carter Wong have undertaken the awesome challenge of rebranding totemic bike company Norton. And we like what we see.

James Lansdowne Norton, when founding the company in 1898, also apparently designed the inaugural logo, wth the help of his daughter. There’s been a steady evolution in the brand’s curvy niceness as you can see below. We think the new logo is working.

“The two ‘o’s had an element of speed to them, both leaning at an angle to create this illusion,” agency head Phil Carter told Creative Review recently, of the original logo. “It was only after manipulating these shapes that the correct amount of motion was achieved by turning the counters only – the inside shapes – rather than the whole letterform. By doing this we created the element of tension as in the original, just where these ‘tyres’ would touch the surface.”

Carter Wong were aided in the redesign of the identity by master typographer Geoff Halpin.

“On a project such as this, looking back is always a sound place to start moving forward, and this proved a true revelation to us on a number of scores,” Carter went on. “The first was our initial idea of doing away with the double crossing of the “t” as we thought that the one provided by the dynamic swoosh should prove sufficient.”

The bike looks pretty cool, too, eh?


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3 Responses to “Norton Rebranded”

  1. Lovely. Nice to see Nortons are back. Interesting typography too.

  2. Sorry give me back a 850 interstate not this hi reving wind chime, at least the got rid of the wankle engine, if they are going to hi rev for bikes sake do somthing with the pipe blueing it looks ugh