LogoLuv
The stories behind the world’s most famous logos: their history, design choices and meaning, plus ideas for designing your own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
