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The history behind the world’s best-known logos: who drew them, how they changed over the decades, and why the marks that lasted still work.
Bacardi’s bat goes back to 1862, when Don Facundo Bacardí Massó found a colony of fruit bats roosting in the rafters of his Cuban distillery and decided they were a good omen. More than 160 years later, the same animal still sits above the name on every bottle.
Look at the pink parts of the Baskin Robbins “BR” and you will find a 31, the number of flavors the founders promised, one for every day of the month. That small trick has done more for the brand than any color change.
Panda Express is the rare fast-food chain whose mascot looks relaxed. Since 1983 its logo has been a black-and-white panda in a red circle, calm where its rivals shout, and that one choice has carried the brand from a mall in Glendale, California, to more than 2,400 locations.
Chipotle now has more than 3,700 restaurants, and every one of them is marked by the same thing it started with in Denver in 1993: a single chili pepper and a plain typeface. Very few restaurant chains have grown that much while changing their logo so little.
7 Up started life in 1929 under one of the worst product names in soft drink history: Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. The short name came soon after, and the logo that grew around it, green with a small red dot, has carried the brand for most of a century.
The shape around the Heinz name is a keystone, the wedge that locks an arch in place and the symbol of Pennsylvania, the state where Henry J. Heinz started bottling horseradish in 1869. More than 150 years later it is still on nearly every bottle the company sells.
The yellow daisy on every Chupa Chups wrapper was drawn by Salvador Dalí, reportedly in about an hour at a café in 1969. It has barely changed since, which tells you something about how right he got it.
When Nabisco launched the Oreo in 1912, its logo was a stamp rather than a design: a plain wordmark whose only job was to tell you whose cookie you were holding. More than a century later the name sits in heavy, rounded capitals on a deep blue field, and that blue has become as much a part of the cookie as the cream.
KFC is one of very few global fast-food chains whose logo is a real man’s face. Colonel Harland Sanders has looked out from the brand’s signs since the 1950s, and every redesign since has had to answer the same question: how much of the Colonel to keep.
Pizza Hut was named after its building. In 1958, Dan and Frank Carney opened a pizza place in a small, hut-like building in Wichita, Kansas, with a $600 loan from their mother, and the name came from the shape of the roof.
In 2018 Dunkin’ Donuts took the word “Donuts” out of its own name, which is a strange thing for a donut chain to do. The logo barely flinched: the same orange and pink, the same chunky, friendly lettering, now spelling only “Dunkin’.”
Look at the pink parts of the Baskin-Robbins “BR” and you will find a 31, the number of flavors the chain built its name on. It is one of the better-known hidden details in fast-food branding, and it is the reason this logo is more interesting than its cheerful colors suggest.
The three dots on the Domino’s logo were meant to be a running total. Each one stood for a store, and the plan was to add a new dot every time the chain opened another location. With more than 20,000 stores today, that idea did not last long, but the three dots did.
Subway started in 1965 as Pete’s Super Submarines, a single shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, paid for with a $1,000 loan. The logo that grew out of it, green and yellow with an arrow at each end, is now one of the most familiar marks in fast food.
The Kellogg logo is a signature. The red script on every box of Corn Flakes grew out of Will Keith Kellogg’s own handwriting, and for well over a century the company has done little more than sharpen it.
The Starbucks siren started life as a bare-breasted, twin-tailed figure lifted from a 16th-century Norse woodcut, printed on the bags of a single Seattle coffee-bean shop in 1971. Over four decades the company covered her up, cropped her in and finally took its own name off the logo altogether.
Pepsi began in 1898 as “Brad’s Drink,” a digestive aid mixed by Caleb Bradham in a North Carolina pharmacy, and its first logo looked like something from the apothecary shelf. Over the next century the name went from spidery script to a bottle cap, a globe and a much-mocked “smile,” and in 2023 it came back to bold capitals in the middle of the globe.
The girl on the Wendy’s sign is a real person. She is Melinda Lou Thomas, the daughter of founder Dave Thomas, and he put her on the sign when he opened his first restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Most luxury houses sign their goods with initials. Versace chose the face of a monster from Greek myth, the Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone. It is one of the strangest logos in fashion and one of the most effective.
Uniqlo’s logo is two red squares, one with the name in Japanese katakana and one in Roman letters, and it is close to the plainest mark any big fashion brand uses. That plainness is the whole strategy.
The Under Armour logo is two letters, a “U” stacked on an “A,” drawn so tightly together that most people read it as a single symmetrical X. It has barely changed since Kevin Plank started the company in 1996, and that refusal to change is a large part of why it works.
The Prada triangle started life as a metal plaque, the kind riveted onto steamer trunks so a buyer knew who had made them. More than a century later it is still doing the same job, on nylon backpacks, sandals and lab-grown diamonds.
The Tommy Hilfiger flag has hardly changed since 1985, and in that time it has been worn by yuppies, by Snoop Dogg and Aaliyah, and by teenagers who discovered it on TikTok. Very few fashion logos have crossed that many crowds without being redrawn to suit them.
The Chanel logo has barely changed in a century. Two interlocking Cs, one facing each way, black on white, have appeared on quilted handbags, perfume bottles and lipstick cases since 1925, and Chanel has never felt the need to modernize them.
The Timberland logo was drawn for a waterproof work boot sold to New England laborers in 1973. Twenty years later the same tree was a fixture of New York hip-hop, and the logo had not changed at all.
Converse was founded in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1908, but the star most people picture when they hear the name did not show up until 1963. It took the success of the All-Star shoe to give the company its symbol, and the logo has been adjusted, tilted and re-lettered several times since without ever losing that five-pointed star.
The Vans logo started as plain lettering on the shoeboxes of a single shop in Anaheim, California, opened in 1966 by Paul Van Doren and his brother Jim. Nobody designed it to be a symbol of skateboarding. Skaters made it one.
The Levi’s batwing borrows its shape from the stitching on the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Introduced in 1967, it took a detail every wearer already knew and turned it into the frame for the brand’s name.
Hans Wilsdorf founded the company in London in 1905 and coined the name Rolex in 1908. In a 1958 speech he claimed a genie had whispered it to him; whether or not that is true, the five-pointed crown that followed has hardly changed since.
The Gillette logo has spent more than a century doing one job: making a man trust a blade near his throat. King C. Gillette started the company in 1901, and the earliest wordmark carried his name with an arrow piercing the “G,” a plain signal of precision.
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 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.
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 PlayStation logo was drawn in 1994 by Manabu Sakamoto, for a company that made televisions and Walkmans and had never sold a games console. His answer was two letters, a P and an S, arranged so they seem to stand in three-dimensional space, which was exactly what the console was promising to do with games.
The Warner Bros shield has introduced films for about a hundred years, and it is one of the few studio logos that changes its mood from movie to movie. It goes dark and weathered before Harry Potter, glossy before Superman, and stays recognizably the same shield every time.
When Bob Kane and Bill Finger introduced Batman in 1939, the bat on his chest was small, black and so plain that nobody would have called it a logo. Since then it has been rounded off, sharpened, stretched and roughed up for almost every decade’s version of the character, and the silhouette has never stopped reading as Batman.
The Star Wars logo began in 1976 with designer Suzy Rice, who drew on the hard, authoritarian lettering of 1930s German propaganda and on sci-fi pulp covers. That is an odd starting point for a family adventure, and it is a large part of why the logo still looks so commanding.
The MTV logo was built to be redrawn. When the channel launched in 1981, Manhattan Design gave it a fat, blocky “M” with a scrawled “TV” sprayed across it, and the shape was meant to be repainted, animated and dressed up differently on air from the start.
Netflix’s first logo, in 1997, had a strip of film reel curling through the name and a muted palette of purple and black. It looked like a video rental shop, which is more or less what the company was.
The first Xbox logo, in 2001, was a chunky metallic X wrapped in a glowing, almost radioactive green. Microsoft was entering a market owned by Sony and Nintendo, and the logo looked like it knew it had to shout.
The Marvel logo most people know is a red rectangle with MARVEL knocked out in white, and it only dates from 2002. Before that, the company went through a shield, a corner box, slanted italics and a red-and-yellow 1990s mess, and its history is a good map of what works in a logo and what doesn’t.
The BBC logo is three letters in three boxes, and that is all it has been for decades. The version introduced in 1997 set B, B and C in Gill Sans, a typeface Eric Gill drew in the 1920s, and it has become one of the most trusted marks in broadcasting.
The Minecraft logo looks like it was cut out of the game itself. Its blocky letters are filled with the same gray cobblestone texture players dig through for hours, and that one decision has kept the wordmark almost unchanged since 2011.
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 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 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 Jeep logo has no animal, no crest and no shield. It is four letters in a sturdy sans-serif, and it has carried one of the best-known names in the car business since the vehicle came out of World War II.
The Land Rover badge was designed to be read on a grille covered in mud. It is a green oval with blocky, utilitarian lettering, and more than seventy years after the first Series I left Solihull it has barely changed.
Toyota’s three-oval emblem took five years to design and did not appear until 1989, more than half a century after the company built its first car. Before that, the brand was identified by a plain line of Japanese katakana.
The Mercedes star started as a mark on a postcard. Gottlieb Daimler is said to have drawn a three-pointed star on a card to his wife in the 1870s, predicting it would one day shine over his factories, and by 1909 his company had adopted it.
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.
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.
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.
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 IBM logo has not meaningfully changed since 1972. That is a remarkable run for a technology company, an industry that usually redesigns its marks every time it reinvents its products, and IBM has reinvented its products several times over.
Few companies get turned into a verb. Xerox did, so thoroughly that it has had to fight to stop “xeroxing” becoming a generic word for photocopying, and its logo has had to carry that weight through more than half a century of reinvention.
Microsoft’s first logo spelled the company’s name with a hyphen, “Micro-Soft,” in lettering that made it obvious the founders were programmers, not designers. Its current logo is four colored squares and the word Microsoft in Segoe, and it took the company nearly four decades to get there.
Intel’s logo has spent more than fifty years selling something almost nobody sees. The chips sit sealed inside other companies’ computers, so the blue wordmark and the “Intel Inside” sticker had to do the job of making a component feel like a brand.
eBay’s first logo looked like a programmer made it, because one did. When Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb in the mid-1990s, branding was not on his list, and the site’s mark was a plain black-and-white affair.
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.
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 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.
American Express started in 1850 as a freight company, hauling goods across the American West, and its first logo looked like it: a bold, plain “American Express Co.” with nothing to suggest luxury. The blue box and the Roman Centurion came much later, once the business had moved from shipping parcels to traveler’s checks and charge cards.
Most people look at the FedEx logo for years before they notice the arrow. It sits in the white space between the “E” and the “x,” pointing forward, and once you have seen it you can’t stop seeing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most shoppers who walk past a Carrefour sign never notice the letter in the middle of it. Between the red arrow and the blue one sits a white “C,” formed entirely by the empty space, and it has been there since 1966.
Target’s first bullseye, in 1962, had three rings. Six years later it was down to one red ring and a dot, and that stripped-back version has been on carts, bags and Super Bowl ads ever since.
The most famous thing about the Toys R Us logo is a mistake made on purpose: the R is printed backward, the way a small child might write it. Charles Lazarus put it there when he renamed his Children’s Bargain Town, and it has lasted through a bankruptcy and a comeback.
When Ruth Handler introduced Barbie in 1959, the doll’s name came in a cheerful handwritten script, in pink. More than sixty years and several redesigns later, the logo is still pink and still a script, and that stubbornness is most of the reason it works.
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.
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.
The Minnesota Timberwolves have redesigned their logo three times since joining the NBA in 1989, and every version has been a wolf. The animal stayed; the drawing got simpler, the blues got bolder, and by 2017 the fur and detail of the early years had been cut back to a clean, flat mark.
The Golden State Warriors have put a bridge at the center of their logo, which is a neat piece of symbolism for a team that changed its name from one city to a whole state. The mark is now a clean blue-and-gold badge, a long way from the franchise’s Philadelphia beginnings.
The Winnipeg Jets logo is less a hockey crest than an air force badge. When the NHL returned to Winnipeg in 2011, fifteen years after the original Jets left for Arizona, the new team chose a fighter jet climbing over a red maple leaf inside a circle, a design that borrows openly from the roundel of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Real Madrid’s crest is essentially a monogram with a crown on top, and the crown was a royal favor: King Alfonso XIII granted the club the title “Real” in 1920. Almost everything else about the badge has been adjusted over the past century, but those two elements have stayed.
FC Barcelona’s crest was not drawn by a designer. It was drawn by one of the club’s own players, Carles Comamala, who won a competition in 1910, and the badge on the shirt today is still recognizably his.
The Lakers are named after Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, and they have played in Los Angeles, a city not known for its lakes, since 1960. The logo they adopted there, a purple-and-gold basketball with the team name across it, has outlasted the mismatch and become one of the best-known marks in American sport.
There is a bear standing in the Toblerone mountain, an arrow between the E and the x of FedEx, and the number 31 tucked into the Baskin Robbins initials. Famous logos are full of these small jokes and secrets, and the best of them are also simple, well-colored marks that would work even if nobody ever spotted the trick.
The first emoji set had 176 icons, each drawn on a grid just 12 pixels square. Shigetaka Kurita designed them in 1999 for NTT Docomo’s mobile internet service in Japan, and within two decades their descendants had become something close to a global written language.
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.
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