Delco Products was a division of General Motors based in Dayton, Ohio, producing automotive components such as shock absorbers, motors and brake systems. The Delco name derived from the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co., founded by Charles Kettering and Edward A. Deeds.[1] In 1929, General Motors formed Delco Products on the foundation of the earlier Delco company.[2]
Design and History
The visual identity most associated with Delco in the early 1960s was created by Lance Wyman, later renowned for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics identity. After graduating from the Pratt Institute in 1960, Wyman joined General Motors through a summer student program in Detroit. There he completed his first professional work: the design of the Delco logo and a packaging system built from a unified brand concept.[3]
Wyman’s packaging system for Delco automotive parts unified 1,200 different packages.[4] The MARCO museum in Monterrey, Mexico, which held a retrospective of Wyman’s work, listed the Delco system for General Motors among projects in its “El logo como monumento” (The logo as monument) section, alongside his work for the Chrysler Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.[5]
During this period, Delco packaging featured a blue and red ring logo, which appeared alongside the “AC” bullseye mark on General Motors parts packaging.[6] The hyphenated “AC-Delco” brand was later consolidated: in 1995, General Motors dropped the hyphen and introduced a new ACDelco logo and marketing initiative, after which the semicircular Delco logo disappeared from product packaging.[7]
Meaning and Symbolism
The blue and red ring logo served as a distinctive identifier on automotive parts packaging, and the unified packaging system Wyman designed brought visual consistency across the 1,200 different package types.[4]
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