Citroën’s double chevron isn’t an arrow — it’s a cog.

Citroën’s famous double chevron — two stacked V-shapes pointing up — looks like a pair of arrows, but its real meaning is mechanical. Before he made cars, André Citroën ran a business manufacturing double-helical (herringbone) gears — gears whose teeth form a V or chevron shape, which run more smoothly and quietly than straight-cut gears. He’d encountered the design (reportedly in Poland around 1900), acquired the rights, and built a company around producing them in steel. When he later founded his car company, he took the chevron shape of those gear teeth as his emblem. So the logo is a direct picture of the product that made his fortune — engineering excellence, drawn as two Vs. Our homage keeps the herringbone-gear idea, not the plain double chevron.

The chevron signals precision from the very first glance.

Choosing a gear tooth as a logo says something specific: this is a company built on engineering and mechanical precision. And it suited André Citroën perfectly, because he was a genuine innovator — Citroën pioneered mass production in Europe (inspired by Henry Ford), and the company went on to produce some of the most technically daring cars in history, from the revolutionary front-wheel-drive Traction Avant to the hydropneumatic, spaceship-like DS. The double chevron, rooted in a gear, is the ideal badge for that heritage: it promises clever engineering rather than mere style. It’s a lovely example of a logo whose meaning is literally the founder’s expertise, carried forward for over a century as a quiet claim to mechanical ingenuity.

Behind the chevron is one of motoring’s boldest companies.

Citroën (the car company) was founded in 1919 by André Citroën, and quickly became known for audacious, unconventional engineering — the sort of company that would suspend a car on gas and fluid instead of ordinary springs, or build a body around aerodynamics decades before rivals. That spirit of doing things differently is central to the brand’s identity, and the gear-derived logo underpins it: it says the company thinks like an engineer first. Citroën was also a marketing pioneer — André famously lit up the Eiffel Tower with the Citroën name in the 1920s, one of the largest advertisements the world had ever seen. The chevron has presided over all of it: a steady mechanical constant through a century of restless invention.

The chevron endures because its meaning is built in.

Across more than a hundred years, Citroën has redrawn the double chevron many times — chrome and three-dimensional, flat and graphic, wide and narrow — but it has always remained two chevrons. It’s had colour shifts too (the earliest 1919 emblem was blue and yellow; the modern brand red is around #E30613). The shape survives because, like Deutsche Bank’s slash or the Chase octagon, it’s abstract enough never to date yet meaningful enough to matter: it can be modernised endlessly without ever losing what it stands for.

That’s the recurring lesson of the strongest logos, and Citroën’s is a particularly pure example because the meaning is so concrete — it’s not a vague symbol of “progress,” it’s a specific engineering component the founder actually manufactured. A logo grounded in a real thing like that has a durability that invented symbols struggle to match. Citroën could re-render the chevron for the next hundred years and it would still, quietly, mean the same thing it meant in 1919: precise, clever engineering, drawn as the teeth of a beautifully made gear.

The enduring takeaway from Citroën is that meaning and consistency beat noise. A mark grounded in a genuine idea — and applied with discipline across every surface and every year — accumulates a kind of quiet authority that no amount of short-term cleverness can buy. Brands are forever tempted to reinvent themselves, but the most powerful identities are usually the most patient ones. The work is less about the initial flash of a design and far more about the long, unglamorous commitment to protecting and nurturing it until it becomes genuinely unmistakable.

A clean, modern sans beside the chevrons.

Citroën pairs the double chevron with a clean, contemporary sans wordmark — ordered and precise. The specimen below stands in with a neutral sans.

One confident red. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Citroën’s modern identity centres on a red #E30613, with black and white; the original 1919 emblem was blue and yellow. Lead with the red below.

Keep the gear idea on hand — save the herringbone homage and the red to a board.