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39 LogoLuv stories about Design Inspiration: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
The PlayStation logo was drawn in 1994 by Manabu Sakamoto, for a company that made televisions and Walkmans and had never sold a games console. His answer was two letters, a P and an S, arranged so they seem to stand in three-dimensional space, which was exactly what the console was promising to do with games.
Most luxury houses sign their goods with initials. Versace chose the face of a monster from Greek myth, the Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone. It is one of the strangest logos in fashion and one of the most effective.
The Jeep logo has no animal, no crest and no shield. It is four letters in a sturdy sans-serif, and it has carried one of the best-known names in the car business since the vehicle came out of World War II.
American Express started in 1850 as a freight company, hauling goods across the American West, and its first logo looked like it: a bold, plain “American Express Co.” with nothing to suggest luxury. The blue box and the Roman Centurion came much later, once the business had moved from shipping parcels to traveler’s checks and charge cards.
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 devil on Manchester United’s crest is borrowed from a rugby league team. Salford’s players were nicknamed the Red Devils, United took the name, and by the 1970s a pitchfork-carrying imp sat in the middle of the club’s red, gold and black shield.
Spotify picked green partly because nobody else in music had claimed it. Apple and Napster had blue and red, and a Swedish startup that wanted to look different from both went for a bright, slightly acid green that it still uses today.
The Prada triangle started life as a metal plaque, the kind riveted onto steamer trunks so a buyer knew who had made them. More than a century later it is still doing the same job, on nylon backpacks, sandals and lab-grown diamonds.
The IBM logo has not meaningfully changed since 1972. That is a remarkable run for a technology company, an industry that usually redesigns its marks every time it reinvents its products, and IBM has reinvented its products several times over.
The Land Rover badge was designed to be read on a grille covered in mud. It is a green oval with blocky, utilitarian lettering, and more than seventy years after the first Series I left Solihull it has barely changed.
