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14 LogoLuv stories about Branding: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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.
The TikTok logo is a single music note, and it looks like it is vibrating even when it sits still on your home screen. That effect comes from two offset colors, cyan and magenta, printed slightly out of register against black, and it has made one of the plainest symbols in music into one of the most recognizable app icons of the past decade.
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 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 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.
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.
Every business needs a logo, and it no longer has to cost hundreds of dollars. A logo is the mark people see before they read anything about you, and free AI tools can now produce a clean, watermark-free one in minutes.
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.
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.
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.
