Unimog Ox Head Logo: Original vs. Recreated Versions

This is a recreation of the original Unimog Ox head logo. I know it was used prior to Mercedes acquiring the company but not sure much more than that.

It was nice to build it with straight lines and clean up the spacing since this was originally hand drawn.

There seems to be a bunch of different variations of this thing and they are not consistent at all.

The red one I am posting is an original hand drawn version for reference:

The orange ox head I built is very commonly used as a stand alone logo. I know a lot of people love this logo, but I have never been a fan. Something about it just bugs me. I think it might be the minimal spacing between the ox horns and the “U” background compared to the ample spacing between the nose ring and the circle background. I don’t know – the thing just looks messy to me.

This is a shorter version that Wikipedia has posted with the full shield background. I do think the shield helps make this logo look better.

Finally, the orange full “UNIMOG” version I built. A few points about this one:

• The “U” part of the ox head logo is shorter than the first stand alone version – closer in size to the shield version above.
• The nose ring in the full version is very different from the stand alone version. I did not replicate that nose ring, it’s just too ugly.
• I also did not include the Mercedes logo. I have been avoiding the star logo in all of my stuff to avoid trademark issues.
• Lastly, I did a ton of cleaning up letter alignment. I assume the original was hand drawn so it was very imprecise. Little things like the thickness of all of the vertical legs now match. And the points of the “N” and “M” are the same height.
• I used DIN Regular as the typeface for the “UNIVERSAL-MOTORGERAT” text. It was really close. The main difference is the roundness of the “O” and the “G” in the original. Most of the other differences, I was able to replicate.