Renault’s 1972 diamond is the work of Victor Vasarely, the founder of Op Art.

Most car badges are drawn by in-house teams or agencies. Renault’s is the rare exception designed by a fine-art giant: in 1972, the losange (diamond) was reworked under Victor Vasarely — the painter who founded Op Art — and executed by his son Jean-Pierre Vasarely, known as “Yvaral.” They turned the diamond into a set of nested, banded chevrons that seem to vibrate and recede, a perfect marriage of a kinetic-art sensibility and an industrial emblem. It first appeared on the Renault 5 and ran for roughly two decades. Our homage borrows the op-art logic — concentric diamonds that shimmer — without copying the badge.

The losange is one of the oldest shapes in motoring.

Renault has centred its identity on a diamond since 1925, evolving from an earlier circular grille badge (which itself once framed the front-mounted horn, so the shape had an acoustic logic). Across a century the losange has been redrawn many times — chrome and dimensional, flat and graphic — but the diamond itself never left. That continuity is the point: Renault didn’t chase new symbols, it kept refining one, letting each era restyle the same shape. Vasarely’s 1972 version is simply the most artistically celebrated chapter in a very long, very consistent story.

The company is older than the shape that represents it.

Renault was founded in 1899 by Louis Renault with his brothers Marcel and Fernand, near Paris — making it one of the oldest car makers still trading under its founding family’s name. That heritage matters to the brand’s confidence: a company with 125 years behind it can afford to keep one simple shape and evolve it slowly, rather than reinvent itself every few seasons. The diamond has outlived founders, wars, nationalisation and global alliances — a small, stubborn constant threaded through more than a century of French industrial history.

The Renaulution rebrand stripped the losange to two lines.

In 2021, as part of its “Renaulution” strategy, Renault unveiled a radically flat, 2D diamond — a single interlocking-line figure with no chrome, no shading, no dimensional trickery, phased onto cars from 2022. It’s the same move nearly every legacy marque has made for the screen age: shed the 3D gloss, keep the silhouette. Purists miss Vasarely’s shimmer, but the logic is sound — a flat mark scales cleanly from a grille to a favicon. The through-line of Renault’s whole identity holds: whatever the treatment, it’s always the diamond, and it’s always been the diamond since 1925.

What makes the Renault story unusual is who got to touch the badge. Handing a mass-market car emblem to Victor Vasarely — a museum-collected fine artist — was a genuinely bold act of patronage, and it paid off in cultural capital that ordinary agency work rarely buys. The 1972 losange doesn’t just identify a car; it carries the aura of Op Art, of galleries and optical experiments, into a supermarket car park. Few brands have ever borrowed prestige so directly from the art world, and fewer still kept the underlying shape stable enough for that association to compound across fifty years.

Step back and the same principle emerges once more: a brand is strongest when every element pulls in one direction. Renault shows how a symbol, a palette, a name and a tone of voice can reinforce a single idea until the whole becomes far greater than any part. Coherence like that is never an accident; it is the result of countless small decisions to stay on-message rather than chase novelty. Get that alignment right, protect it patiently over time, and an identity stops being something a company merely owns and becomes something people recognise instinctively.

A modern geometric sans to carry a flattened badge.

Modern Renault pairs the flat losange with a clean geometric sans wordmark — the brand commissioned a bespoke typeface family (“Renault Group” / “Renault Life” faces) for its recent identity. The specimen below stands in with a neutral geometric sans.

A signature acid yellow, plus black. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Renault’s signature colour is a bright yellow #EFDF00, usually paired with black or white; the flat 2021 diamond most often appears as black-on-light or white-on-dark. Legacy yellows around #FFCB00 also circulate. Lead with #EFDF00 below.

Keep the Vasarely idea on hand — save the op-art homage and the yellow to a board.