LogoLuv
The stories behind the world’s most famous logos: their history, design choices and meaning, plus ideas for designing your own.
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.
The first YouTube logo was a joke about old televisions: “You” in black, “Tube” in white inside a red, rounded rectangle shaped like a cathode-ray screen. Twelve years later the screen became a play button, and the play button became the logo.
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.
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.
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.
People decide what they think of a brand in seconds, and the logo is usually the first thing they see. That is why companies spend thousands, sometimes millions, on a mark that might end up as a single curve or a bitten piece of fruit.
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.
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.
