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82 LogoLuv stories about Logo Evolution: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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.
Uniqlo’s logo is two red squares, one with the name in Japanese katakana and one in Roman letters, and it is close to the plainest mark any big fashion brand uses. That plainness is the whole strategy.
The Under Armour logo is two letters, a “U” stacked on an “A,” drawn so tightly together that most people read it as a single symmetrical X. It has barely changed since Kevin Plank started the company in 1996, and that refusal to change is a large part of why it works.
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 Warner Bros shield has introduced films for about a hundred years, and it is one of the few studio logos that changes its mood from movie to movie. It goes dark and weathered before Harry Potter, glossy before Superman, and stays recognizably the same shield every time.
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.
The Tommy Hilfiger flag has hardly changed since 1985, and in that time it has been worn by yuppies, by Snoop Dogg and Aaliyah, and by teenagers who discovered it on TikTok. Very few fashion logos have crossed that many crowds without being redrawn to suit them.
The Chanel logo has barely changed in a century. Two interlocking Cs, one facing each way, black on white, have appeared on quilted handbags, perfume bottles and lipstick cases since 1925, and Chanel has never felt the need to modernize them.
