Valhalla Island

On the way to uni the other day I was caught in one of the many traffic jams I get caught on everyday. One sec, I’m going to go on a tangent. These hold ups are always because of road works, the roads never stop getting fixed. But what I noticed is that they don’t rip up the old road, they just lay the new road on top. This is especially noticable when you see traffic islands that aren’t so much traffic islandss anymore because the bitumen has been layered on just as high. I wonder what sort of solution this is, how many times will they layer a new road onto the old ones? How high and thick will the road get before they stop?

Ok, anyway, back on topic. While in this traffic jam I had the pleasure of being caught behind the Renault Megane (pictured). Now what I noticed here is the badge, more noticably the word MEGANE, more notciably again, the letter A. It doesn’t have a crossbar. I asked in #wordpress today what the real name for that little line is but neither them nor Wikipedia could help me so I figured I wasn’t going to find it anywhere.

Let’s get back on topic again. By no means is the Megane a luxury or higher class of car, it’s just your straight forward small sedan. This picture really does it no justice (you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to even find that picture) but on a clean car with chrome lettering it had a certain elegance about it, all revolving around the A’s missing crossbar. Sure the typeface also adds a feeling of elegance with it’s thick and thin combinations but what really makes it is the A. It got me thinking about the smallest details adding a certain feeling to how you might feel about something.

The Angels and Airwaves logo is another example of not using a uppercase A’s cross bar and I think it works beautifully. If you have ever heard A and A’s music you’d know that it suits their music style perfectly. Espeically when used with Vs the A is very effective.

My point is that the slightest details can convey a much larger message and should not be overlooked. I’m sure that when designing a car the badge is the last thing you would want to spend a great deal of time on, which is obvious with many cars but Renault have done a brilliant job at making me look at an average car as something elegant and executive.