Holy Crap 1970s GMC Typography Was So Much Fun: Cold Start

Automotive badge typographic trends are pretty fascinating, and I think reveal far more about a given time, place, and culture than most people realize. I have some quarter-finished starts of a big story about this that I’ve been extremely effective at not finishing, but that doesn’t mean I can’t point out some favorite examples as I think of them, right? So I’m going to do that, right now, as I sit in this airport, exhausted, waiting for my flight home, thinking about the typography used on the badging of 1972 to (I think) 1981 third-gen GMC C/K pickup trucks and GMC vans.

I like these badges and typography because, according to modern sensibilities around trucks, they seem almost an impossibility.

Modern truck typography is bold and blocky and has letterforms that feel like they’ve been punched out of granite with iron fists. We get a lot of stuff like this, from the 2024 GMC Sierra:

Wide, thick, serious letterforms, maybe with a high-techy tinge, but definitely no-nonsense kind of lettering. Back in the ’70s, GMC badged its Sierras like this:

All-nonsense back then, and I think it was fantastic.

The whole GM line of Sierra trucks used this sort of mildly zany serif typography:

…and it also leaked out to some Chevys, like the Suburban:

…and on vans, too, like the GMC VanDura:

It was all over the place, and the more I look at these. badges, the more I’m delighted. The typography felt more like the titles to some ’70s sitcom than a work truck, with the jaunty wobbly baseline of the letters, all crammed in there together and climbing all over each other like they’re playfully wrestling or something.

The use of a serif font here is interesting too; normally, a somewhat staid serif font like this conveys seriousness and trust and official-dom, but the jaunty and seemingly haphazard way the letters are arranged and sized takes all this and flips it on its head, and makes the whole thing seem strangely fun and a little unhinged.

You look at these badges, and I think maybe you hear a bit of something like this:

Some letterforms get distorted a bit, like the elongated tail on the “a” or how the “r” pair crams together, and that just adds even more playfulness to the whole thing. The contrast of the serif letterforms with the bonkers arrangement and kerning makes for a more subversive feel; if these were blocky san-serifs, it would feel more childish, I think.

Can you imagine trying to pitch a look like this for a current-generation GMC Sierra today? Imagine being the badge designer and going into a meeting with the product planners for the Sierra and saying something like “For the bold new Sierra, the badging has one extremely important job to do: bring the kooky!” 

They’d have you escorted out by security guards before the meeting was over.

Anyway, I miss this less-serious era of car badging, and I hope one day some automaker has the ‘nads to re-introduce the concept of zany into their badging again. I think the world needs it.