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45 LogoLuv stories about Brand Identity: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
The Tour de France started in 1903 as a publicity stunt for a newspaper, and its first “logo” was little more than lettering printed in the yellow of L’Auto. The cyclist silhouette that fans now know came much later, in the 1980s.
