Alex Ramadanis, a New York educator currently serving as an adjunct professor at Queens College, is very fond of cars and motorcycles. Some of Alex Ramadanis’s favorite vehicles come from Volkswagen, a manufacturer best known for the iconic Beetle.

While production of the Beetle began in Germany in the 1930s, it earned much of its notoriety for its 1959 ad campaign when Volkswagen changed both its advertising approach and the development of the model, trying several new things. Both the advertising campaign and the manufacturer itself embraced honesty and simplicity. In fact, the 1959 advertisement featured only a small picture of the vehicle, as well as a switch from the serif typefaces that were commonly used in advertisements at the time to sans serif typeface.

The Beetle underwent essentially no stylistic changes for at least a decade surrounding the popular 1959 advertisement, avoiding the common pressure among vehicle manufacturers for customers to pursue the latest vehicle. The image Volkswagen has managed to cultivate for the Beetle is one of the enduring images in the automotive industry. The production of the vehicle has continued with only modest updates for the better part of a century, with production finally coming to a close in 2018.