What Is the Renault Diamond?

Renault was founded in 1899 as Société Renault Frères by Louis Renault and his brothers Marcel and Fernand. The first badge, dated 1899 in the archive and 1900 by Wikipedia, was the brothers' intertwined initials. In 1906, as mass production began, it became a gear-shaped ring with an early car inside. After the First World War the emblem showed an FT tank in a black circle, recalling the vehicle that earned Louis Renault the Legion of Honour, and in 1923 a round grille badge with horizontal bars carried the name.

Then, in the mid-1920s, the round shape gave way to the diamond.

Renault's own history says the diamond was used alongside the round grille from 1924, appearing on the front of the 40 CV Type NM executive tourer, and was definitively adopted in 1925. Horizontal lines filled the first lozenges. By 1930 the badge was a black diamond with heavy stripes and the name in a central band.

As for the reason, a French source says the lozenge suited the lines of the bonnet, which meet in a central ridge, and another says the shape echoed the earlier grille. Neither is a design brief, and no source found for this page gives one documented reason. Renault describes the diamond as expressing a firm wish to project a strong and consistent corporate image, and that is the only official statement. No designer of the 1925 lozenge is credited.

In 1972 Renault asked the Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely, a pioneer of Op art, to draw a new logo that kept the diamond. The result was a set of nested black diamond lines on a yellow square, with the name below, in use from 1973. A heavier striped version followed in 1982.

This is one of the best-documented moments in the logo's life, and it shows how the company handles its symbol. The shape stays and the artist changes the drawing.

Yellow first shows up in 1946, when Renault had just been nationalized in 1945. The diamond came back with a yellow upper half and the words Régie Nationale below the name. A 1967 version moved the emblem onto a yellow square, and the yellow became the standard background for decades. Renault has not published a reason for the choice, so any explanation is interpretation. The Renault Yellow in the archive is sampled from the 2008 chrome badge on a yellow square.

The current logo was unveiled in January 2021 with the Renault 5 Prototype concept and made official in March. It is a black outline diamond built from two nested bands that break and overlap, with no chrome and no yellow background. Renault design director Gilles Vidal said the response was very positive. The gaps and overlaps are a description of the drawing, since Renault has not published a meaning for them.