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70 LogoLuv stories about logo creator: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
The BBC logo is three letters in three boxes, and that is all it has been for decades. The version introduced in 1997 set B, B and C in Gill Sans, a typeface Eric Gill drew in the 1920s, and it has become one of the most trusted marks in broadcasting.
The Winnipeg Jets logo is less a hockey crest than an air force badge. When the NHL returned to Winnipeg in 2011, fifteen years after the original Jets left for Arizona, the new team chose a fighter jet climbing over a red maple leaf inside a circle, a design that borrows openly from the roundel of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Real Madrid’s crest is essentially a monogram with a crown on top, and the crown was a royal favor: King Alfonso XIII granted the club the title “Real” in 1920. Almost everything else about the badge has been adjusted over the past century, but those two elements have stayed.
The first YouTube logo was a joke about old televisions: “You” in black, “Tube” in white inside a red, rounded rectangle shaped like a cathode-ray screen. Twelve years later the screen became a play button, and the play button became the logo.
FC Barcelona’s crest was not drawn by a designer. It was drawn by one of the club’s own players, Carles Comamala, who won a competition in 1910, and the badge on the shirt today is still recognizably his.
The Lakers are named after Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, and they have played in Los Angeles, a city not known for its lakes, since 1960. The logo they adopted there, a purple-and-gold basketball with the team name across it, has outlasted the mismatch and become one of the best-known marks in American sport.
Most people look at the FedEx logo for years before they notice the arrow. It sits in the white space between the “E” and the “x,” pointing forward, and once you have seen it you can’t stop seeing it.
The Minecraft logo looks like it was cut out of the game itself. Its blocky letters are filled with the same gray cobblestone texture players dig through for hours, and that one decision has kept the wordmark almost unchanged since 2011.
The name came first. In 1932 a Danish carpenter shortened leg godt, “play well,” to LEGO, and the word happened to mean “I put together” in Latin, which is about as lucky as naming gets.
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.
