Author
Every story Ashley Brown has written for LogoLuv: the history, design and meaning behind famous logos.
Burger King’s best logo is more than fifty years old. The 2021 redesign went straight back to the 1969 “bun” mark, two golden halves with the name squeezed between them, after three decades of shinier, louder versions.
NASA has had two famous logos and has fired each of them once. The busy “meatball” of 1959 was replaced in 1975 by the sleek red “worm,” and in 1992 the agency threw the worm out and brought the meatball back.
Apple’s first logo was a pen-and-ink drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. It lasted about a year. Its replacement, Rob Janoff’s bitten apple, has now been on the company’s products for almost five decades.
The Red Bull logo was not invented in Austria. Its two charging bulls and golden sun come from Krating Daeng, a Thai energy drink whose name means “red gaur,” and Dietrich Mateschitz kept the idea almost intact when he launched Red Bull in 1987.
Every business needs a logo, and it no longer has to cost hundreds of dollars. A logo is the mark people see before they read anything about you, and free AI tools can now produce a clean, watermark-free one in minutes.
Mastercard is confident enough in two overlapping circles that since 2019 it has often left its own name off the logo. Very few brands could get away with that, and the reasons it works go back to 1969.
There is a bear standing on its hind legs inside the mountain on a Toblerone box, a nod to Bern, the city where the chocolate was invented in 1908. In 2023 the mountain itself had to go, because Swiss law no longer allowed the Matterhorn on a bar that was partly made in Slovakia.
Ferrari’s prancing horse was first painted on a fighter plane. It belonged to Francesco Baracca, Italy’s leading flying ace of World War I, and it reached Enzo Ferrari’s cars because Baracca’s mother suggested he use it for luck.
The Louis Vuitton monogram was invented to stop people copying the company’s trunks. In 1896, four years after Louis Vuitton died, his son Georges covered the canvas in his father’s initials and a scattering of flowers so that fakes would be easy to spot. It is now the most counterfeited pattern in fashion.
Apple’s first logo, in 1976, was an engraving of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. A year later it was a rainbow apple with a bite out of it. Most famous logos have a story like that somewhere in their past, and the changes say a lot about the companies that made them.
