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68 LogoLuv stories about Design History: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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 shape around the Heinz name is a keystone, the wedge that locks an arch in place and the symbol of Pennsylvania, the state where Henry J. Heinz started bottling horseradish in 1869. More than 150 years later it is still on nearly every bottle the company sells.
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.
The MTV logo was built to be redrawn. When the channel launched in 1981, Manhattan Design gave it a fat, blocky “M” with a scrawled “TV” sprayed across it, and the shape was meant to be repainted, animated and dressed up differently on air from the start.
When Nabisco launched the Oreo in 1912, its logo was a stamp rather than a design: a plain wordmark whose only job was to tell you whose cookie you were holding. More than a century later the name sits in heavy, rounded capitals on a deep blue field, and that blue has become as much a part of the cookie as the cream.
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.
Converse was founded in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1908, but the star most people picture when they hear the name did not show up until 1963. It took the success of the All-Star shoe to give the company its symbol, and the logo has been adjusted, tilted and re-lettered several times since without ever losing that five-pointed star.
The most famous thing about the Toys R Us logo is a mistake made on purpose: the R is printed backward, the way a small child might write it. Charles Lazarus put it there when he renamed his Children’s Bargain Town, and it has lasted through a bankruptcy and a comeback.
Netflix’s first logo, in 1997, had a strip of film reel curling through the name and a muted palette of purple and black. It looked like a video rental shop, which is more or less what the company was.
The first Xbox logo, in 2001, was a chunky metallic X wrapped in a glowing, almost radioactive green. Microsoft was entering a market owned by Sony and Nintendo, and the logo looked like it knew it had to shout.
