Author
Every story Ashley Brown has written for LogoLuv: the history, design and meaning behind famous logos.
Disney’s first “logo” was nothing more than Walt Disney’s name in blocky serif type on the Alice Comedies. A century later the company signs its films with a glowing 3D castle and a shooting star, and the route between the two says a lot about how a brand grows up.
The first Google logo was made by Sergey Brin in GIMP, a free graphics program, and it showed. It had 3D letters in four colors and, from 1998, an exclamation mark borrowed from Yahoo!.
Amazon nearly launched as Cadabra, until Jeff Bezos’s lawyer misheard the name as “cadaver.” The logo that followed went through a river, zebra stripes, a giant O and a yellow swish before it landed, in 2000, on the orange arrow that runs from a to z and doubles as a smile.
Gap’s 2010 logo lasted about a week. That is the record on this list, but it is not the only redesign that a big company paid for, launched with confidence and then had to defend, rethink or quietly drop.
Harley-Davidson built motorcycles for seven years before it had an official logo. When the Bar and Shield arrived in 1910, it looked less like a piece of branding than a license plate bolted to a badge, and that plainness is exactly why it has lasted.
The Coca-Cola logo was written, not designed. In 1886 Frank Mason Robinson, the bookkeeper to the drink’s inventor, wrote the name out in the Spencerian handwriting taught in American schools, and that piece of penmanship is still on every can.
The Baskin-Robbins logo has had the number 31 hidden in it for years, tucked into the pink parts of the B and the R, and most customers never notice. Once you do see it, you can’t stop seeing it, and that is exactly what makes a hidden detail worth putting into a logo.
The golden arches started as part of a building. Before they were a letter M, they were two huge yellow parabolas holding up the roof of a McDonald’s restaurant, designed to be seen from a moving car.
For most of its first 25 years, the Nike Swoosh did not appear on its own. It came with the word NIKE sitting on top of it, first in chunky 1970s capitals and later in Futura Bold, and only in 1995 did the company decide the curve could carry the brand by itself.
The Nike swoosh, the Apple apple and the McDonald’s arches have one thing in common: you could draw any of them from memory after seeing it once. That is the standard a new logo has to meet, and it is harder than it looks.
