The Burger King Logo: Why the Bun Came Back
Burger King spent twenty years with a shiny blue swoosh round its burger, then threw it away for a flat logo from 1969. It was one of the best rebrands of its time.
A journal of iconic marks
Where logos tell stories
The history, design choices and meaning behind the world’s most famous logos, plus ideas for designing your own.
Latest stories
The Samsung Logo: From Three Stars to a Blue Ellipse
Samsung means “three stars” in Korean, and the first logos showed exactly that. Today the brand is a plain blue wordmark with two missing lines.
The Lamborghini Logo: A Tractor Maker, a Star Sign and a Raging Bull
Lamborghini’s charging bull came from its founder’s star sign and a love of bullfighting. It was also a deliberate answer to the horse on a Ferrari.
More stories
The Nintendo Logo: From Playing Cards to the Red Pill
Nintendo was making playing cards in Kyoto for almost eighty years before it made a video game. Its logo, a word inside a red rounded outline, is simple enough to sit on all of it.
The Porsche Logo: A Crest Sketched for America
The first Porsche sports cars had no badge, only the name in metal letters on the bonnet. The crest arrived a few years later, because an importer in New York asked for one.
The Lacoste Logo: How a Tennis Nickname Became a Crocodile
The green crocodile on a Lacoste shirt started as a joke about a suitcase. It ended up as one of the first logos anyone wore on the outside of their clothes.
The Audi Logo: Four Rings and the Companies Behind Them
The four rings on an Audi do not stand for Audi. They stand for four car makers in Saxony that merged in 1932, and only one of them was called Audi.
The Puma Logo: The Leaping Cat and the Formstrip
Puma began with a quarrel between two brothers in a small Bavarian town. What it built afterwards is a lesson in how to look fast: a cat in mid-leap and a stripe that sweeps along the side of a shoe.
The Volkswagen Logo: The Story Behind the VW Badge
The Volkswagen badge is a V stacked on a W inside a circle, and it has been that since the 1930s. It has been cleaned, chromed and flattened, but it has never been replaced.
The Adidas Logo: How Three Stripes Became a Global Brand
Adidas started with stripes that had a job. Adi Dassler stitched leather bands along the sides of his running shoes to hold the foot steady, and only later did anyone think of them as a logo.
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