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91 LogoLuv stories about logo maker: logo history, design choices and what they mean.
The WWF panda was modeled on a real animal: Chi-Chi, a giant panda who arrived at London Zoo from China in 1958 and drew crowds with her black-and-white coat and gentle manner. Three years later a new conservation group needed a symbol that would work in any country and any language, and she was the obvious choice.
Harvard’s shield is one Latin word split across three open books on a crimson field. It is close to two centuries old as a formal emblem, it was never designed by a branding agency, and it works better than most logos that were.
Burger King’s best logo is more than fifty years old. The 2021 redesign went straight back to the 1969 “bun” mark, two golden halves with the name squeezed between them, after three decades of shinier, louder versions.
NASA has had two famous logos and has fired each of them once. The busy “meatball” of 1959 was replaced in 1975 by the sleek red “worm,” and in 1992 the agency threw the worm out and brought the meatball back.
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.
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.
