The badge is a piece of German civic heraldry, borrowed with intent.

Ferry Porsche commissioned the crest in December 1951; designed by engineer Franz Xaver Reimspieß, it first appeared in 1952 on the 356’s steering-wheel hub. At its centre is the black rearing horse of Stuttgart (the city was a ‘Stutengarten,’ a stud farm), framed by the red-and-black stripes and antlers of Württemberg, with the PORSCHE wordmark forming a roof across the top. Because the horse, antlers and crest are all protected, our homage keeps only the safe parts — a quartered shield, honeycomb texture and the gold-and-red palette.

An evolution of an icon, not a redesign.

Style Porsche spent about three years modernising the crest, unveiling the result in 2023 (rolling onto cars from late that year). The elements and proportions stayed; what changed was the finish — a brushed precious-metal look, a 3D honeycomb-textured background, a redrawn horse and a more subtle, less-saturated gold. It’s a study in how a heritage mark modernises: touch the material and the light, leave the meaning alone. Note the crest’s finish is a metallic gradient, so no single flat hex captures the gold — hence the ramp in our palette.

The company began as a design consultancy, not a carmaker.

Porsche was founded on 25 April 1931 in Stuttgart by Ferdinand Porsche with Anton Piëch and Adolf Rosenberger — initially an engineering-and-design consultancy that did work-for-hire (including early work on the VW Beetle). The marque’s own first car, the 356 ‘No. 1’ roadster, received its operating permit on 8 June 1948. A commonly-repeated note: Reimspieß is also credited with the VW roundel — though that attribution is contested, so we say ‘credited with’ rather than settled fact.

One custom family across every market and screen.

The corporate typeface is Porsche Next, a custom family (Type Tailors: Hendrik Weber, Fred Smeijers, Corina Cotorobai, Thomas Thiemich) covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and more, rolled out around 2019–2020 as part of the brand-system overhaul. The PORSCHE wordmark itself is a bespoke, evenly-spaced all-caps logotype — not simply Porsche Next in caps. The specimen below is set in a clean sans in the same precise spirit.

A heraldic palette carried by a metallic gold ramp. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Porsche’s palette — described as essentially unchanged since 1963 — pairs black and Porsche Red #B12B28 with a gold that is really a gradient, from a deep #C69632 up through #FCDC99. That’s why the crest reads as metal rather than flat colour; there’s no single official flat hex for the 2023 ‘more subtle’ gold, so use the ramp and don’t invent one. Copy the working values below.

Porsche’s most powerful brand asset isn’t the crest at all — it’s a car silhouette almost unchanged since 1963.

The 911, styled under Ferdinand Alexander ‘Butzi’ Porsche and launched in 1963, established a profile — the sloping roofline falling to a rounded tail, the round headlamps — that the company has refined but never abandoned across six decades. That continuity is a deliberate design doctrine: where rivals restyle dramatically each generation, Porsche treats its silhouette the way it treats the crest, as an inheritance to be evolved rather than replaced, so a new 911 is instantly legible beside a fifty-year-old one. Butzi’s credo — that good design needs no ornament and that function dictates form — runs from the cars to the calm, engineered restraint of the whole visual identity.

The crest itself is treated as jewellery, and its craft is part of the message. On the car it sits as a raised, enamelled, hand-finished badge on the bonnet and the wheel hubs, a small precious object whose gold-and-red heraldry deliberately signals heritage and status in a way a flat printed logo could not. That is why the 2023 refinement obsessed over metal finish and honeycomb texture rather than shape — the value lives in material and light. Across badge, silhouette and typography Porsche pursues one consistent idea: that prestige is communicated through precision and continuity, and that the most convincing luxury is the kind that looks as though it was engineered rather than merely designed.

Keep the heraldic-shield idea and the gold-red-black system on hand — save it to a board.