Dig, don't invent

A service station once stood in Remuera, a leafy suburb of Auckland, with the family name hand-painted above the forecourt. Les and Ruth McLaren owned it, and it's where their son Bruce got the motoring bug and built the car that won his first race.

That sign is now a wordmark. McLaren revealed an evolved identity last week that runs across its road cars and its racing teams, and the new lettering is drawn from the hand-painted original. Almost everything else stayed put. The Speedmark remains, Papaya is still the main color, and the Speedy Kiwi crest isn't going anywhere.

We find the restraint more interesting than the lettering. McLaren has changed its badge often. The first crest was a kiwi drawn in 1964 by motorsport artist Michael Turner, a friend of Bruce's. The 1980s brought a checkered flag mark from Raymond Loewy, and the Speedmark arrived in 1997. This is the first version in sixty years that goes all the way back to the family garage.

A company that now builds hypercars and races in Formula 1 found its future on a petrol station sign in the suburbs. That's one of the smartest identity decisions of the year, and the raw material cost them nothing.

For most of our profession's history, invention was the expensive part. A new mark, a new palette, a look nobody had seen before took real time and talent, and clients paid accordingly. That arrangement is gone. Anyone with a subscription can generate a hundred plausible identities before their coffee cools (if you prefer tea, we mean you too). Once newness gets that cheap, the market stops paying much for it, and the value moves to whatever can't be conjured on demand.

Nobody can generate your past.

This is the part we find genuinely exciting. Generative tools learn from what has been digitized, and most of a company's real history never was. Think of the lettering on a delivery van from 1971, the founder's handwriting on an old price list, or the green the machines were painted because that paint was cheap that year. It sits in shoeboxes and filing cabinets and in the heads of people who have worked there for thirty years. A competitor can't reach any of it, and a model has never seen it. McLaren isn't alone in digging.

We should also say where this goes wrong, because it sometimes does. Heritage can turn rather predictable and expected when there’s very little effort. You've seen the sepia filter, the "Est. 1887" on a company founded in 2019, the distressed serif that signals old the same lazy way a stock photo of a handshake signals partnership. That's nostalgia, and it copies how the past looked. McLaren did something closer to archaeology.

They kept the character of the sign and redrew it for now. Nobody looks at the new wordmark and thinks it's from 1955. You get the sense it came from somewhere, which is a feeling you can't fake with a texture overlay.

The useful question, then, is what was always true about this brand, and it's a different question from what used to look nice.

This approach travels well, and it may travel best to the places the design industry has spent decades overlooking. Every city has a visual vernacular that rarely shows up in a trend report. You can see it in shopfront signs painted by hand, the lettering on buses and market stalls, and the colors a particular trade has used for as long as anyone remembers. For many of our readers outside the big design capitals, that material is on the walk to work. It's specific, local, and almost nobody has scanned it.

In a world of infinite generated sameness, that's about as close to an unfair advantage as design gets.

It works for people too, and this is the bit we most want emerging creatives to hear. Your portfolio competes with thousands of others made with the same tools and tutorials. Your own archive is material nobody else has: where you grew up, what your family made, the strange obsession you've had since you were eleven. We've written in Ding! that identity is the one thing that never becomes a commodity. Digging is the practical version of that belief.

At a small studio, curators of Ding! we call this building the being before the brand, and the method is mostly patience mixed with listening. Ask to see the physical archive before you see the brand guidelines. Interview the longest-serving employee before the CMO. Look for things that were made by hand, out of necessity, before anybody had a strategy.

Photograph the forms, signage, and packaging nobody thinks matters. Then hold each item up and ask whether it would still feel true if the company was founded tomorrow. Keep what passes. Redraw it for the present. Leave the rest in the box, gently.

McLaren could have paid anyone to invent something new, and plenty of people would have happily taken the brief. Instead, somebody went through old photographs, found a sign painter's work from decades ago, and decided that was the future.

What's in your client's shoebox? And while we're asking, what's in yours?