I’ll keep this short — figured Chrysler merited a post though, since they’re changing their stripes again.

Chrysler’s made the rounds, shacking up with all sorts of suitors. They were recently dumped by Daimler, and now they’ve declared bankruptcy and are actively courting Fiat.

Their original medallion logo was designed in 1925, the year the company came about. It looks like a blue ribbon you’d see at a county fair:

Kinda reminds me of the Stater Bros grocery store logo:

Chrysler’s next logo was designed by Virgil Exner, freshly hired from Studebaker. The mid fifties through the early sixties was known as the “Forward Look” era at Chrysler, with Exner’s space-age, aerodynamic cues (inspired by Cadillac) surfacing on all cars and advertising:

That logo was replaced by the ubiquitous “pentastar” mark in 1963. It was designed by Robert Stanley, at the design firm Lippincott & Marguiles:

Says Stanley, “We were looking for something that would not be too complicated for people to remember and still have a very strong, engineered look to it.”

Until the early seventies, the pentastar showed up on the bottom passenger-side fender of all Chrysler automobiles (Dodge, Jeep, Chrysler, Plymouth), similar to what GM currently does. Chrysler currently has Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler brands in its portfolio (Eagle, part of the AMC acquisition of the late eighties, went away less than ten years after its creation, and Plymouth died in ‘01).

By the time Chrysler merged with Daimler in the late nineties, the pentastar had been mostly phased out.

Chrysler got on a serious retro kick and started branding their cars with a wide-winged variation of the medallion first used back in the twenties:

A revised, more dimensional pentastar was back in 2007 though (when Daimler gave up most of Chrysler to Cerberus), at least as a high level company logomark (the wings are still on the cars themselves).

Chrysler’s model marks run the gamut from plain, italicized letters to, more recently, ornate, glossy, dimensional designs:

Curious to see what happens to ‘em.