Tag
91 LogoLuv stories about logo maker: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
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.
Instagram’s first icon was a little brown Polaroid-style camera with a rainbow stripe, drawn in 2010 when the app was a photo-filter toy. In 2016 the company threw out the camera’s textures and shading and kept only its outline, filled with a magenta-to-orange gradient.
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.
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.
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 first emoji set had 176 icons, each drawn on a grid just 12 pixels square. Shigetaka Kurita designed them in 1999 for NTT Docomo’s mobile internet service in Japan, and within two decades their descendants had become something close to a global written language.
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.
