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70 LogoLuv stories about logo creator: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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.
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.
The Tour de France started in 1903 as a publicity stunt for a newspaper, and its first “logo” was little more than lettering printed in the yellow of L’Auto. The cyclist silhouette that fans now know came much later, in the 1980s.
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.
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’.”
eBay’s first logo looked like a programmer made it, because one did. When Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb in the mid-1990s, branding was not on his list, and the site’s mark was a plain black-and-white affair.
Look at the pink parts of the Baskin-Robbins “BR” and you will find a 31, the number of flavors the chain built its name on. It is one of the better-known hidden details in fast-food branding, and it is the reason this logo is more interesting than its cheerful colors suggest.
