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68 LogoLuv stories about Design History: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
When Ruth Handler introduced Barbie in 1959, the doll’s name came in a cheerful handwritten script, in pink. More than sixty years and several redesigns later, the logo is still pink and still a script, and that stubbornness is most of the reason it works.
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.
Intel’s logo has spent more than fifty years selling something almost nobody sees. The chips sit sealed inside other companies’ computers, so the blue wordmark and the “Intel Inside” sticker had to do the job of making a component feel like a brand.
The Marvel logo most people know is a red rectangle with MARVEL knocked out in white, and it only dates from 2002. Before that, the company went through a shield, a corner box, slanted italics and a red-and-yellow 1990s mess, and its history is a good map of what works in a logo and what doesn’t.
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.
In 2018 Dunkin’ Donuts took the word “Donuts” out of its own name, which is a strange thing for a donut chain to do. The logo barely flinched: the same orange and pink, the same chunky, friendly lettering, now spelling only “Dunkin’.”
The Mercedes star started as a mark on a postcard. Gottlieb Daimler is said to have drawn a three-pointed star on a card to his wife in the 1870s, predicting it would one day shine over his factories, and by 1909 his company had adopted it.
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.
