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82 LogoLuv stories about Logo Evolution: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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.
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 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.
People decide what they think of a brand in seconds, and the logo is usually the first thing they see. That is why companies spend thousands, sometimes millions, on a mark that might end up as a single curve or a bitten piece of fruit.
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.
Apple’s first logo was a pen-and-ink drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. It lasted about a year. Its replacement, Rob Janoff’s bitten apple, has now been on the company’s products for almost five decades.
The Red Bull logo was not invented in Austria. Its two charging bulls and golden sun come from Krating Daeng, a Thai energy drink whose name means “red gaur,” and Dietrich Mateschitz kept the idea almost intact when he launched Red Bull in 1987.
