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82 LogoLuv stories about Logo Evolution: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
Every business needs a logo, and it no longer has to cost hundreds of dollars. A logo is the mark people see before they read anything about you, and free AI tools can now produce a clean, watermark-free one in minutes.
Mastercard is confident enough in two overlapping circles that since 2019 it has often left its own name off the logo. Very few brands could get away with that, and the reasons it works go back to 1969.
There is a bear standing on its hind legs inside the mountain on a Toblerone box, a nod to Bern, the city where the chocolate was invented in 1908. In 2023 the mountain itself had to go, because Swiss law no longer allowed the Matterhorn on a bar that was partly made in Slovakia.
Ferrari’s prancing horse was first painted on a fighter plane. It belonged to Francesco Baracca, Italy’s leading flying ace of World War I, and it reached Enzo Ferrari’s cars because Baracca’s mother suggested he use it for luck.
The Louis Vuitton monogram was invented to stop people copying the company’s trunks. In 1896, four years after Louis Vuitton died, his son Georges covered the canvas in his father’s initials and a scattering of flowers so that fakes would be easy to spot. It is now the most counterfeited pattern in fashion.
Apple’s first logo, in 1976, was an engraving of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. A year later it was a rainbow apple with a bite out of it. Most famous logos have a story like that somewhere in their past, and the changes say a lot about the companies that made them.
Disney’s first “logo” was nothing more than Walt Disney’s name in blocky serif type on the Alice Comedies. A century later the company signs its films with a glowing 3D castle and a shooting star, and the route between the two says a lot about how a brand grows up.
Amazon nearly launched as Cadabra, until Jeff Bezos’s lawyer misheard the name as “cadaver.” The logo that followed went through a river, zebra stripes, a giant O and a yellow swish before it landed, in 2000, on the orange arrow that runs from a to z and doubles as a smile.
Harley-Davidson built motorcycles for seven years before it had an official logo. When the Bar and Shield arrived in 1910, it looked less like a piece of branding than a license plate bolted to a badge, and that plainness is exactly why it has lasted.
The Coca-Cola logo was written, not designed. In 1886 Frank Mason Robinson, the bookkeeper to the drink’s inventor, wrote the name out in the Spencerian handwriting taught in American schools, and that piece of penmanship is still on every can.
