Author
Every story Ashley Brown has written for LogoLuv: the history, design and meaning behind famous logos.
The most famous story about the BMW roundel, that it shows a spinning propeller, is one BMW itself has debunked. It persists anyway, because it is a better story than the truth, and because the badge has barely changed since 1917.
Twitter’s first bird cost about $15. It was a stock illustration by the designer Simon Oxley, bought from iStock, and within a few years it had been redrawn into one of the most recognized symbols on the internet.
The Louis Vuitton monogram was designed in 1896 to stop people copying the company’s trunks, and it has become one of the most copied patterns in fashion. Georges Vuitton’s interlocking L and V, set among flowers and stars, has barely changed in nearly 130 years.
The name came first. In 1932 a Danish carpenter shortened leg godt, “play well,” to LEGO, and the word happened to mean “I put together” in Latin, which is about as lucky as naming gets.
Dell’s logo is so plain it could pass for a drinks coaster: a blue circle with “DELL” inside and the E tipped on its side. That plainness has carried the company from a college dorm in 1984 to a business worth around $100 billion.
The four letters of IKEA are an address. They stand for Ingvar Kamprad, the farm he grew up on and the parish around it, and they have been sitting in a blue-and-yellow box on the side of stores around the world for decades.
Shell is one of the few oil companies whose logo started as a literal picture of the business. The Shell Transport and Trading Company grew out of a trade in actual seashells, and the scallop it put on its signs has stayed there for more than a hundred years.
In 2006 Ford put its own logo up as collateral. The Blue Oval, along with other company assets, was pledged against a $23.5 billion loan to get the company through the auto industry’s crisis, and it took Ford until 2012 to get it back.
The WWF panda was modeled on a real animal: Chi-Chi, a giant panda who arrived at London Zoo from China in 1958 and drew crowds with her black-and-white coat and gentle manner. Three years later a new conservation group needed a symbol that would work in any country and any language, and she was the obvious choice.
Harvard’s shield is one Latin word split across three open books on a crimson field. It is close to two centuries old as a formal emblem, it was never designed by a branding agency, and it works better than most logos that were.
