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70 LogoLuv stories about logo creator: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
The three dots on the Domino’s logo were meant to be a running total. Each one stood for a store, and the plan was to add a new dot every time the chain opened another location. With more than 20,000 stores today, that idea did not last long, but the three dots did.
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.
Subway started in 1965 as Pete’s Super Submarines, a single shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, paid for with a $1,000 loan. The logo that grew out of it, green and yellow with an arrow at each end, is now one of the most familiar marks in fast food.
The Kellogg logo is a signature. The red script on every box of Corn Flakes grew out of Will Keith Kellogg’s own handwriting, and for well over a century the company has done little more than sharpen it.
The Gillette logo has spent more than a century doing one job: making a man trust a blade near his throat. King C. Gillette started the company in 1901, and the earliest wordmark carried his name with an arrow piercing the “G,” a plain signal of precision.
The Starbucks siren started life as a bare-breasted, twin-tailed figure lifted from a 16th-century Norse woodcut, printed on the bags of a single Seattle coffee-bean shop in 1971. Over four decades the company covered her up, cropped her in and finally took its own name off the logo altogether.
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.
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 react to a logo’s color before they read a single letter of it. Coca-Cola red and Tiffany blue are doing different jobs, and the difference lies as much in shade, saturation and context as in the hue itself.
Pepsi began in 1898 as “Brad’s Drink,” a digestive aid mixed by Caleb Bradham in a North Carolina pharmacy, and its first logo looked like something from the apothecary shelf. Over the next century the name went from spidery script to a bottle cap, a globe and a much-mocked “smile,” and in 2023 it came back to bold capitals in the middle of the globe.
