In November 2024, Jaguar did something almost no legacy carmaker dares to do. It deleted its own cat. The leaping jaguar that had marked the brand since 1938 lost its place on the new identity, replaced by a mixed-case wordmark and a burst of primary color. The reaction was immediate, and the sales numbers followed.
Key Points
- Jaguar's 2024 rebrand dropped the leaping cat from its core identity and replaced it with a mixed-case "JaGUar" wordmark set in a bespoke geometric typeface.
- Sculptor and illustrator F. Gordon Crosby created the original leaping jaguar mascot in late 1938, after SS Cars publicity chief Bill Rankin pushed for a proper factory design.
- Accenture Song and Jaguar's in-house agency Spark44 worked on the rebrand, though about 25 to 30 staff objected in writing to the project going to external consultants.
- Jaguar sales fell from 61,661 in 2022 to 33,320 in 2024, then to 49 European registrations in April 2025, a collapse driven largely by a planned wind-down before the electric relaunch.
What Is the Jaguar Logo?
The Jaguar logo today is a wordmark, not an animal. Since November 2024, the primary mark has been the word "Jaguar" set in a custom geometric typeface that mixes capital and lowercase letters, written as "JaGUar." The famous leaping cat, the "Leaper," still exists as a secondary device, but it no longer leads the brand.
That reversal is the whole story of this logo. For more than 80 years, the Jaguar identity was the cat. The 2024 rebrand bet that a luxury logo could shed its most recognizable asset and gain more than it lost. Whether that bet paid off is still an open question, and the sales record so far makes it a hard case to argue.
Who Created the Original Leaping Jaguar?
Automotive illustrator and sculptor Frederick Gordon Crosby created the original leaping jaguar mascot, which first appeared on cars in late 1938. Crosby spent most of his career drawing for The Autocar, and Jaguar heritage records credit him as the artist who gave the marque its cat.
The current DesignRush article named no one, which left the single most important design credit in the whole history missing.
The push for the mascot came from inside the company. William Lyons, the founder, had seen an aftermarket leaping-cat ornament from a firm called Desmo and disliked it, reportedly saying it looked like a cat shot off a fence, as Magneto magazine documents. Lyons wanted a version that matched his cars.
That job fell to Bill Rankin, the publicity and marketing chief at SS Cars, who arranged for a proper factory mascot. Jaguar's own heritage account credits Crosby with designing the Leaper that reached the public in 1938 and stayed in production until 1951. Rankin drove the project. Crosby drew the cat.
How Did the Jaguar Logo Evolve?
Jaguar's logo history is a slow climb from a sidecar badge to a global emblem. The company began in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company, founded by William Lyons and William Walmsley in Blackpool, England. Its early mark was an interlocking "SS" inside a hexagonal shield.
The Jaguar name arrived in 1935, first as a model designation on the SS Jaguar. The leaping cat followed in late 1938 as a bonnet mascot. After the war, in 1945, the firm renamed itself Jaguar Cars Limited to drop the "SS" initials.
From the 1950s into the 1970s, Jaguar refined the Leaper into a more muscular, lifelike form and added the circular "Growler," a snarling jaguar head used on grilles. The 1980s and 1990s flattened the cat into a cleaner silhouette for print and screen.
The 2000s softened the Leaper's hard angles for a more natural look, and the wordmark moved from green to black. A 2012 update gave the cat a polished silver finish, and a 2021 version flattened it again into a contoured, single-color mark. Each step kept the cat. The 2024 rebrand did not.
What Changed in the 2024 Jaguar Rebrand?
The 2024 rebrand rebuilt the identity around type instead of the animal. Jaguar unveiled the new look on November 19, 2024, calling the lettering the "Device Mark." It uses a rounded geometric sans-serif with even stroke weight and the unusual mixed-case spelling "JaGUar," with the G and U capitalized so the letters line up at a single height, as Autocar Professional detailed.
Jaguar has not publicly named the new bespoke typeface, so the honest description is a custom geometric sans built for the brand rather than a licensed font. The prior wordmark, by contrast, used a face in the Jaguar JC family. Naming the type this precisely matters for a design review, and the original article left it blank.
Two more elements came with the launch. The "Artist Mark" is a monogram of a "J" and an "r" held in a circle, drawn so it reads upright even when flipped upside down. The "Strikethrough" is a set of horizontal lines that can carry the wordmark or frame a reinterpreted Leaper.
Chief Creative Officer Gerry McGovern framed the whole project as "exuberant modernism", a phrase Jaguar repeated across the launch. McGovern also described the brand as imaginative and "unique and fearless," and Managing Director Rawdon Glover called the work "a complete reset." The campaign took the tagline "Copy Nothing" from founder William Lyons, who believed a Jaguar should be "a copy of nothing."
What Are the New Jaguar Brand Colors?
The 2024 wordmark renders in gold and white, a clean break from the metallic silver and black of earlier Jaguar identities. At the launch, Jaguar also showed the lettering in brass, chosen because it patinates over time, which is where the warm gold reading comes from, as Wallpaper reported.
Jaguar does not publish official hex codes for the wordmark, so the values below are approximations drawn from third-party design coverage:
Who Designed the 2024 Jaguar Rebrand?
Credit for the rebrand is genuinely contested, and that dispute became its own news story. The official version is a collaboration between Jaguar's in-house agency, Spark44, and the consultancy Accenture Song, which had won the Jaguar Land Rover account in 2021 and acquired Spark44 the same year. Some coverage frames the work as led by Accenture Song, while other reports treat it as a shared effort.
The friction surfaced in writing. About 25 to 30 in-house staff signed a letter to McGovern objecting that the identity work had gone to external Accenture consultants without proper consultation, as reported by TheStreet, citing Autocar India. The team said the move undercut their creative role. For a piece about a "branding story," that internal split is central, and the original article skipped it.
The safe, sourced summary is this: Spark44 and Accenture Song both worked on the rebrand, the project ran under McGovern, and a large share of the in-house team publicly disowned how it was handled. Anyone who states a single author is choosing a side the record does not settle. Businesses weighing a similar move can see why the choice between an in-house team, an outside branding agency, or specialist logo design companies carries real internal risk.
Did the Jaguar Rebrand Hurt Sales?
Jaguar's sales fell hard around the rebrand, but the cause is more complicated than the logo. Global sales dropped from 61,661 in 2022 to 33,320 in 2024, a fall of about 46%, according to Consultancy.uk. The steepest figure came in 2025. Jaguar registered just 49 new vehicles across Europe in April 2025, down 97.5% from 1,961 a year earlier, based on data from the European carmakers' association.
The context changes how to read those numbers. Jaguar deliberately ended production of its entire combustion lineup, including the F-Type, XE, and XF, before its new electric models were ready. That left showrooms with almost nothing to sell, so a sharp drop was planned rather than purely a market verdict, as Carscoops noted. Glover has said Jaguar expects only about 15% of its current buyers to return, because it is chasing a new audience on purpose.
The financial picture also cuts against the simplest story. Jaguar Land Rover posted a pre-tax profit near £2.5 billion for the year to March 2025, carried largely by Land Rover. The rebrand clearly damaged Jaguar's near-term volume and public standing. Pinning the entire sales collapse on the logo alone ignores the deliberate product gap behind it.
Did Jaguar Drop the Agency Behind the Rebrand?
Jaguar Land Rover moved to part ways with Accenture Song after the backlash. In May 2025, the company launched a global review of its account with its creative agencies, first reported by Campaign and widely read as a step toward replacing the agency, whose contract runs to mid-2026. DesignRush covered the review in its own reporting on the creative account going under review.
That development lands after the original article's last update in January 2025, which is why it is missing there. The review followed the same pattern as the sales news. DesignRush also tracked the moment Jaguar's European numbers reached just 49 cars in a month, the low point that hardened the pressure on the account.
How Does Jaguar's Rebrand Compare to Other EV-Era Rebrands?
Jaguar is the outlier among legacy automakers that rebranded for the electric era. Most kept their core symbol and simply modernized it. Jaguar retired its heritage mark from primary use, which is why the reaction was so much louder than the others.
The pattern is clear. General Motors, Kia, Volvo, and Nissan all treated the electric shift as a reason to clean up a familiar mark. Jaguar treated it as a reason to start over. That difference explains both the attention the brand captured and the risk it took on, and it is the kind of decision worth studying against current logo design trends and other award-winning designs.
Verdict
The Jaguar logo is a strong mark caught inside a high-stakes gamble. The Leaper is one of the best animal emblems the car industry has produced, and Crosby's 1938 cat still reads with more energy than the new wordmark. The 2024 identity is competent and deliberate, but it traded a symbol people loved for a typographic system built to provoke.
The provocation worked as publicity and failed, so far, as reassurance. Jaguar earned enormous attention and a collapsed sales chart in the same year, and it dropped the agency that helped build the campaign. The verdict on the logo cannot be separated from the verdict on the strategy, and that one will not be settled until the new electric cars arrive.
Jaguar spent 86 years teaching the world to recognize a cat. Then it asked the world to recognize a word instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who designed the new Jaguar logo?
Jaguar's in-house agency Spark44 and the consultancy Accenture Song developed the 2024 identity together, under Chief Creative Officer Gerry McGovern. Accenture had acquired Spark44 in 2021. About 25 to 30 in-house staff later signed a letter objecting that the work went to external Accenture consultants, so no single designer can be named with certainty.
Why did Jaguar change its logo in 2024?
Jaguar changed its logo to reset the brand for an all-electric, ultra-luxury relaunch aimed at a younger, wealthier audience. McGovern called the new direction "exuberant modernism," and the campaign used the tagline "Copy Nothing," drawn from founder William Lyons.
Did Jaguar's rebrand hurt sales?
Jaguar sales fell sharply, from 61,661 in 2022 to 33,320 in 2024, then to 49 European registrations in April 2025. Most of that drop came from Jaguar deliberately ending its old lineup before new electric models were ready, not from the rebrand alone. Jaguar Land Rover's overall profit rose in the same period.
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