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39 LogoLuv stories about Design Inspiration: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
Dell’s logo is so plain it could pass for a drinks coaster: a blue circle with “DELL” inside and the E tipped on its side. That plainness has carried the company from a college dorm in 1984 to a business worth around $100 billion.
Harvard’s shield is one Latin word split across three open books on a crimson field. It is close to two centuries old as a formal emblem, it was never designed by a branding agency, and it works better than most logos that were.
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.
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.
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.
Amazon nearly launched as Cadabra, until Jeff Bezos’s lawyer misheard the name as “cadaver.” The logo that followed went through a river, zebra stripes, a giant O and a yellow swish before it landed, in 2000, on the orange arrow that runs from a to z and doubles as a smile.
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.
The Baskin-Robbins logo has had the number 31 hidden in it for years, tucked into the pink parts of the B and the R, and most customers never notice. Once you do see it, you can’t stop seeing it, and that is exactly what makes a hidden detail worth putting into a logo.
The Nike swoosh, the Apple apple and the McDonald’s arches have one thing in common: you could draw any of them from memory after seeing it once. That is the standard a new logo has to meet, and it is harder than it looks.
