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68 LogoLuv stories about Design History: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
Georges Vuitton drew the LV monogram in 1896 to stop people copying his father’s trunks. More than a century later the same pattern works on a luggage tag, a billboard and a 16-pixel browser icon, which is a better result than most logos designed last year can claim.
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.
Shell is one of the few oil companies whose logo started as a literal picture of the business. The Shell Transport and Trading Company grew out of a trade in actual seashells, and the scallop it put on its signs has stayed there for more than a hundred years.
The WWF panda was modeled on a real animal: Chi-Chi, a giant panda who arrived at London Zoo from China in 1958 and drew crowds with her black-and-white coat and gentle manner. Three years later a new conservation group needed a symbol that would work in any country and any language, and she was the obvious choice.
Apple’s first logo was a pen-and-ink drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. It lasted about a year. Its replacement, Rob Janoff’s bitten apple, has now been on the company’s products for almost five decades.
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.
Mastercard is confident enough in two overlapping circles that since 2019 it has often left its own name off the logo. Very few brands could get away with that, and the reasons it works go back to 1969.
There is a bear standing on its hind legs inside the mountain on a Toblerone box, a nod to Bern, the city where the chocolate was invented in 1908. In 2023 the mountain itself had to go, because Swiss law no longer allowed the Matterhorn on a bar that was partly made in Slovakia.
Ferrari’s prancing horse was first painted on a fighter plane. It belonged to Francesco Baracca, Italy’s leading flying ace of World War I, and it reached Enzo Ferrari’s cars because Baracca’s mother suggested he use it for luck.
The Louis Vuitton monogram was invented to stop people copying the company’s trunks. In 1896, four years after Louis Vuitton died, his son Georges covered the canvas in his father’s initials and a scattering of flowers so that fakes would be easy to spot. It is now the most counterfeited pattern in fashion.
