Logo evolution

The idea of the capital letter stretching horizontally over the name's other letters, like a roof, was born in New York, on a day back in 1908.

It was a chance discovery, due to a request from a Pirelli representative who was there.

The commercial and advertising jungle was getting thicker by the day and a young, albeit not unknown name needed to stand out starkly among the lot.


-The new visitor who had just arrived from Italy asked-  Will this do for you?- And he sketched a strange shaped P on a piece of paper.

-Yes, that could work- the other man took a quick glance at the piece- Actually its going to do fine.-.

He kept on looking at it, a look of satisfaction, as he imagined the P spread across a signboard or against the backdrop of the sky.

In America it was accepted immediately, the same thing also happened here, when the man who came up with the idea got back from his business trip.
 

Just a year before that the Peking-Paris feat had been accomplished.

Between June and august Barzini and Borghese dashed over 17.00 kilometres of jerks, dust, mud and stony surfacing without much trouble thanks to Pirelli tyres.

The reputation, already strong thanks to various rubber products and cables started expanding to the tyres segment, or rather the Pneus, as it was called by the more sophisticated people and as it was frequently referred to in write-ups, on signboards and letterheads. (At first the French language dominated in the sector: semelle, noir ferré, etc; English came afterwards).

Even today Pirelli, which also means cables and plastics, is present in the minds of the audience largely as rubber.

There is an obvious commercial reason behind all this but there also has to be  an unconscious reason. Maybe we are not far from the truth when identifying a part of the reason in sport victories, starting from when a race was called a Grand Prix or a part of  the reason could be in the notion of elasticity which the sign we are talking about surely suggests.
 

Look at the prolonged cavity in the P, the way it stretches out and ask yourself  whether it resembles the definition studied in physics books about the factor due to which bodies, after deformation, take their original primitive form.

But at this point, to question whether the concept of elasticity led to the stretched P or whether it was the stretched P that reminded people about the concept of elasticity is like asking the senseless question about the egg and the chicken. If anything, it would just mean that the sign was right on the spot, perfect, as if fifty years of advertising fortune and hence, popularity aren't enough to prove the same.
 

In fact, the form of the capital P, after being deformed accidentally just once, has never given a sign of going back to its original primitive form in the last 50 years.

The deformation has an uneasy start, a little story, which we'll say has more to do with handwriting rather than graphics, which it then became.
 

Initially it was affected by some kind of floral taste , the capital P was fluttering and  it had a decorative influence over the other letters; once it stopped fluttering and was posed vertically along the post of the P, damaging the P's cavity; and yet another time it twisted around the word pneu turning into a radiator, bonnet, car body, in unison with the red racing car; and then there was a P that affected the final "s" in pneus,  which generated a flexible and multicoloured group of motorcyclists, which to today's observer would seem like the rumbling gang from the first shots of "the wild one".

The interesting element was that contagious happiness, which the P from Pirelli used to cast on words that were placed besides it in advertising.

A benchmark for all was, the binomial name, PNEUS PIRELLI  followed by PIRELLI CORD, each pair was marked with the stretched out initial letter, right up to today's binomial name PIRELLI LASTEX, a reflection of the reciprocal attraction between words in the past or just popular graphic styles.

The elastic cavity in the P that stretches out and gets thicker and rounder towards the end where the invisible hand holds it, not allowing to spring back, is a kind of Disney-like intuition, it came well ahead of its time.

It is like a character in a story that itself generates characters: It gives its name to an inspired and rich chapter, in what was the story of the billboards in the early twenties of the last century.

As the finger kept on pulling on the stretched out alphabet, in the meantime the figure of Pierino from Codognato, riding on his fast paced bike was born; the active kid kicking around in a heaven made up of coloured balls; the hidden fox on the tyre ( followers and hunters will never get to him…) ; and a gentleman in an overcoat under the heavy slanted rain, happily walking over two umbrellas; another Pierino not in good relations with umbrellas and not really protected form the rain, however equally happy about the result the PIRELLI RUBBERS produce on the written page, in the notebook that is threatened by the rain ( and yet again the stretched out P pulled along the G and the C).

 As the finger stopped pulling and the maximum level of elasticity seemed to have been reached, the story -we're already past the 1920s- slows down; it brings to the forefront more realistic characters, more calm and composed, the cavity of the P hardens and falls in line with the cold light of the WHITE STAR after 1930.

The changes are mainly related to the name's other letters or the characters of the words that are placed next to the name; all kinds of hand written styles or touches are avoided, no loops or swirls of any type, a kind of edgy impression is placed on the post of the P, and every now and then, alas! The characters take a kind of gravestone - like feeling

That's why, immediately after 1945 the graphic tradition of the name was quite varied and contradictory as well as needing some rules.
 

Hand in hand with the evolution of graphic art, which basically in this case led to simplicity and harmonisation of the language, the weight that was to be put on  the P was established for once and for all, all kinds of appeals were foregone, the measure of the deformation of the P was permanently set; the thickness of the other letters was fixed in order to render them exactly the same in all printing processes: all accompanying slogans, write ups and marginal write-ups in and around the name were to be done in Cairoli font.

Today it seems impossible that there can be further changes or innovations about how to write the name

To be honest , last year the cavity formed P was giving out some signs of uneasiness.

Taking for granted, and rightfully so based on the story, that he himself  was the only decision maker, with the help of a friend he provided a visible example. Only of him, just him, he absorbed the entire post of the letter P, taking on its communicative value and in exchange for that he allowed the letters of the full name to written out inside his area.  We don't know if his wish will be satisfied.