LogoLuv
The stories behind the world’s most famous logos: their history, design choices and meaning, plus ideas for designing your own.
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 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 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.
Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, and blue is the color he sees best. It is one of the few logo decisions in tech history that was made for the founder’s eyes rather than the customer’s, and it stuck.
Instagram’s first icon was a little brown Polaroid-style camera with a rainbow stripe, drawn in 2010 when the app was a photo-filter toy. In 2016 the company threw out the camera’s textures and shading and kept only its outline, filled with a magenta-to-orange gradient.
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.
Georges Vuitton drew the LV monogram in 1896 to stop people copying his father’s trunks. More than a century later the same pattern works on a luggage tag, a billboard and a 16-pixel browser icon, which is a better result than most logos designed last year can claim.
People react to a logo’s color before they read a single letter of it. Coca-Cola red and Tiffany blue are doing different jobs, and the difference lies as much in shade, saturation and context as in the hue itself.
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 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.
