People are just noticing this weird detail in Ford’s century-old logo

Ford has used some version of its famous script logo for more than a century, but despite its widespread usage, people are scratching their heads over a detail they just noticed.

In a viral TikTok, user Monica Turner asked viewers to pick the correct version of the automaker’s logo, one with a funny-looking flourish on the logo’s “F” and one without. Viewers were split on which version they thought was correct, and to some commenters’ surprise, it’s the one with the curlicue.

Side by side and to the untrained eye, the real Ford logo looks fake next to its dupe. In the age of corporate blanding, the curlicue flourish reads as fake, but it’s been there as far back as the 1910s, according to a vintage advertising sign in the Henry Ford Museum. Some commenters—including a former Ford mechanic and another who worked at a Ford dealership—got it right, but the rest of us should know better too. Ford’s F-150 truck has been the long-running best-selling vehicle in the U.S., and over multiple rebrands, Ford has kept the script styling of its logo intact.

From top: The 1907 version of Ford’s logo by C. Harold Wills, and a contemporary version [Images: Ford]

The origin of Ford’s logo

The logo, designed by Ford engineer and former letterpress printer C. Harold Wills, is inspired by its founder’s signature, but it’s not an exact replica. (Ford’s signature, notably, didn’t include the curlicue.) Like the script logo for Coca-Cola, founded several decades before Ford, the automaker’s logo was created in an era of ornate script branding that’s survived through multiple iterations and a trend toward sans-serif type all the way to the 21st century. When legendary designer Paul Rand created a handsome, modern, non-script logo concept for Ford in 1966, Henry Ford II decided against it because he thought it would have been too radical.

[Photo: Ford]

Imagine Ford’s logo, and you’re likely to recall the script font and blue oval, but perhaps other details are a bit hazy. That’s normal. Studies have shown that humans are terrible at remembering logos because our brains don’t bother storing unnecessary information unless we choose to memorize it; that way we can free up space to remember more important things. That leads to our inability to remember whether the bite mark and tilt of the leaf on the Apple logo is on the left or right (it’s the right) or whether or not the Fruit of the Loom logo has a cornucopia in it (it doesn’t).

Since the minutia of Ford’s logo isn’t a pressing concern for most of us, our brain stores only the basics. See an oval badge with script type, and you know it’s Ford. Look a little closer, though, and the details may surprise you.

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