Porsche revealed a nipped and tucked version of its popular crest earlier this year, the fruit of a scarcely believable 3-year project that resulted in a badge that to most individuals appears practically precisely the identical as the old badge, just a bit much less shiny.

But that is understandable. Although several automakers have revised their logos and badges in the previous couple of years, the brands with the truly recognisable badges, badges that are element of the fabric of the firm  – VW, Audi, Porsche, Ferrari – have a tendency not to mess as well considerably with the formula.

So it comes as a shock to find out that in the early 1960s Porsche deemed replacing its iconic crest with a new badge that looked absolutely nothing like it. Archivists at the Porsche Museum have dug out some of the proposals and beyond a couple of them featuring a stylized letter ‘P’ and some red and gold coloring, there’s absolutely nothing to connect them to the Porsche badge we know and adore. One of them even appears disturbingly like a Transformer head.

But why did Porsche consider it required a new badge only eight or nine years right after introducing 1 that had turn into so recognizeable on the hoods of the company’s automobiles? Much of it comes down to the restricted technologies of the time. Making the badges wasn’t the difficulty, but reproducing them in printed material was simply because colour printing was nonetheless reasonably uncommon and high-priced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And the multi-colour crest didn’t stand out nicely in black and white.

Related: Porsche Facelifts Iconic Crest For 75th Anniversary, Can You Tell?

Some Porsche dealers and sales managers also believed the original style was as well busy to function on a road automobile. “The different colours and many details as a whole do not amount to a compact, coherent visual effect in road traffic,” they wrote in a letter to Porsche and its head of marketing, Hermann Lapper, in 1961.

The Mercedes 3-pointed star and VW logo, the latter made by Franz Xaver Reimspieß, the man accountable for the Porsche crest, had been held up as great examples of wonderful style, and industrial artist Hans Lohrer was commissioned to generate a choice of options. The program was for the winning style to make its debut on the successor to the 356, the 911.

Fortunately for us, Porsche decided not to greenlight the badge modify right after all. The precise cause is unknown but firm archivists consider bosses may have reasoned that junking a logo that had been in use for ten years wasn’t such a wonderful thought right after all. And despite the fact that the crest has been via a couple of light facelifts given that, it is nonetheless at heart the identical badge 1st observed on the 356 far more than seven decades ago.