Retooled Logo

Volvo logo as of 2006, an automobile car company, untouched

For this project, we were asked to take a logo from the real world, and retool it and change it into something else, to create a commentary of our society or of the company itself.  I decided to use the company logo for the car manufacturer "Volvo."  When I first saw a commercial for this car company, my first reaction to it's logo was, "that's sexist!" looking at the Mars symbol that the company used, which also is a symbol of the male gender.  Taking that idea of the male symbol, I decided to retool Volvo into the female symbol, Venus, and change the the word "Volvo" into "Vulva" which is the word for the female external genitalia.  

Doing some research on both the terms and the history of Volvo, I learned that Volvo was originally a Swedish car manufacturer that also made construction items.  The logo we see today was originally the logo for Volvo's line of ball bearings, using the symbol of Mars, which also represents iron, to state that's what their ball bearings were made of since iron is a very strong metal.  The symbol for Venus represents the metal copper, with this in mind I was going to change the greys in my retooled logo to browns to represent copper, but copper is an inferior metal to iron, and I did not want to imply that women are inferior to men.  "Volvo" and "vulva" also stem from the same Latin root "volvere" which means "to roll."  In the case with the company, they used the conjugated form meaning "I roll" and with the case of the female genitalia, vulva literally translated to "wrapper" in Old Latin.

"Vulva", my version of "Volvo", retooled