Famous Logos: Logo History and the Evolution of Their Design

Why logo history is mostly about subtraction

Read the logo history of any long-lived mark and the same thing has happened. Early versions are crowded with words, borders, shading and small illustrations. Later versions keep one shape and drop the rest. The reason is mechanical before it is aesthetic: a mark has to print on a bottle cap, a truck, a newspaper and now a phone icon.

That pattern holds across very different businesses. Apple swapped an engraving of Isaac Newton for a bitten fruit within a year. Starbucks cut its siren down from a full figure to a face and then dropped its name. McDonald’s turned a building into a letter. Each change made the mark simpler and, oddly, more personal at the same time.

Among famous logos, exceptions stand out because they are rare. A few brands keep detailed emblems on purpose, usually to signal heritage: beer labels, whisky crests, sports clubs. Even there each redraw tends to be cleaner. Collect enough examples of logo history and you start to see logo design less as invention and more as careful editing over decades.

Before logos: trademarks, seals and the 1870s

Merchants marked goods long before anyone used the word logo. Potters stamped jars, printers used devices on title pages, and guilds had seals. What changed in the nineteenth century was law. Britain’s Trade Marks Registration Act 1875 let businesses register a mark and defend it, which turned a sign into property.

The first mark registered under that act, in January 1876, was the red triangle of the Bass brewery. It is still printed on bottles. A plain triangle in one colour is about as simple as a mark can be, and it shows that the modern instinct toward bold shapes is older than modernism.

The 1880s added handwriting. Coca-Cola’s flowing script, written in the Spencerian style common in American bookkeeping, dates from the drink’s early years in Atlanta. Script logos felt personal and were hard to copy convincingly. The full story sits on the Coca-Cola script page, and the letterforms have changed remarkably little since.

The eras of logo design in the twentieth century

Early twentieth-century marks borrowed from posters and packaging: ornate frames, banners, illustrated figures and mascots. Many brands relied on drawn characters rather than abstract symbols, which came later. McDonald’s own first mascot, a running chef called Speedee, belongs to this tradition, as do the cartoon figures covered on the brand mascots page.

After the Second World War the corporate identity movement took over. Designers trained in European modernism argued that a company needed one consistent symbol used the same way everywhere. Paul Rand drew IBM’s logo in 1956 and the striped eight-bar version in 1972. IBM says that version has remained unchanged since, a remarkable run for any mark.

The 1960s and 1970s produced many of the abstract symbols still in use: interlocking letters, geometric monograms, simple circles and stripes. They were built for a world of trucks, uniforms and annual reports. Colour palettes narrowed to one or two flat inks, a shift tracked decade by decade in the brand colours by decade report.

Logo history in Canada

The Canadian chapter of logo history has its own landmark. In 1960 Canadian National Railways introduced a mark by the Toronto designer Allan Fleming: the letters C and N joined into one continuous line, meant to suggest movement across the country. It caused a national argument at the time, and critics compared it to a tapeworm.

Fleming reportedly predicted the logo would last at least fifty years. It has passed sixty-five, still on locomotives and freight cars. He also designed the Ontario Hydro symbol and worked as art director of Maclean’s before his death in 1977. For many Canadians the CN mark is the first abstract logo they ever learned to read.

Other Canadian marks followed quite different paths. The Canadian Tire triangle pairs a red triangle with a green maple leaf, and the Air Canada maple leaf has gone through several roundels and colourways. The Tim Hortons story is a script-and-founder tale, closer to Coca-Cola’s flowing script than to the abstract CN mark.

Famous logos that barely changed

The most famous logos share a habit of standing still. Nike’s Swoosh, drawn by a Portland State student for $35 in 1971, has kept its outline for more than half a century; the company simply stopped printing its name beside it in 1995. The Swoosh story shows how a rushed job outlived every alternative.

Apple’s bitten fruit is the same idea in a different shape. Its outline has not changed since 1977, while the fill went from six rainbow stripes to one colour in 1998 and through glossy and metallic phases before going flat. The Apple chapter also covers the rainbow tribute of April 2026.

McDonald’s arches have kept the double-arch M drawn in 1968, and the golden arches page explains how a roofline became a letter. Starbucks has made only three updates since 1971, all edits to one figure, traced on the siren page. Four famous logos from very different companies, one shared lesson about leaving a good shape alone.

Stability is not the same as neglect. All four brands adjusted colour, spacing and proportions many times, often in ways only designers notice. A small digression: the most valuable logo guideline documents are often dull to read, page after page of minimum sizes and clear space. That dullness is part of why the marks themselves survive.

The evolution of dropping the name

One of the clearest trends in modern logo evolution is the wordless mark. A brand confident that people know its symbol stops spelling out its name. Nike did it in 1995. Starbucks did it on March 7, 2011, for its fortieth anniversary, when the green siren lost her outer ring and the words around her.

Dropping the name is a bet on familiarity, and it only works after decades of exposure. It also frees the mark from the language of one market. A wordless siren reads the same in Montreal and Tokyo. The risk is that newer customers, especially younger ones, may not connect the symbol to anything at all.

Some brands drop the name halfway. They keep it in advertising but take it off the product, or keep a short form, a monogram or initials. Others go the opposite direction and drop the symbol, keeping only a wordmark. The logo redesign frequency report tracks how often each of these moves appears among large brands.

The flat redesign wave of the 2010s

Phones changed logos more than any design movement did. Interfaces moved to flat colour around 2013, and marks with bevels, gloss and drop shadows suddenly looked dated on a home screen. Simple flat shapes also scale better, from a tiny app icon to a stadium screen, which made the case easy for any board to accept.

The redesigns came quickly. Microsoft introduced four coloured squares and a plain wordmark in 2012. Google replaced its serif lettering with a geometric sans-serif in September 2015. Volkswagen flattened its roundel in 2019, and BMW presented a flat, partly transparent version of its own in 2020. Kia replaced its oval with angular lettering in 2021.

Each change made sense on its own terms. Together they had a side effect: marks that were once distinctive began to share a vocabulary of flat colour, geometric type and thin outlines. Some of those redesigns were excellent. Others felt like the same instruction applied to every company, regardless of what the company actually made.

The 2020s blanding debate

Critics started calling the pattern blanding: different brands converging on the same plain, bold, sans-serif wordmark with no illustration and no quirks. Fashion houses were the most quoted examples. Saint Laurent simplified its name in 2012, and in 2018 Burberry dropped its equestrian knight for a heavy sans-serif wordmark and a new monogram.

The objection was not to simplicity itself. A logo has one job, which is to be recognized, and a wordmark that looks like five competitors fails at that job however neat it is. The debate also had a cultural edge. Plain marks read as modern to some people and as cold to others, especially customers attached to the old versions.

Defenders had a reasonable answer. Plain marks print cleanly, adapt to every screen and let product photography do the talking. For a brand rebuilding after decline, a clean break can be useful. The trouble began when clean breaks became the default, chosen by habit rather than by any particular problem the old mark had caused.

When logo evolution goes wrong

Gap’s 2010 redesign is still the textbook warning. The retailer replaced its tall blue box with a plain wordmark and a small gradient square, met an immediate online backlash, and went back to the old logo within about a week. Social media had turned every customer into a critic overnight, and the speed of the reaction surprised the company.

Jaguar’s identity change, announced on November 19, 2024, drew a similar storm. The new look used sharply drawn lettering in mixed upper and lower case and a launch film with no car in it. Critics questioned whether the brand had lost its identity; Jaguar defended the move as a bold reinvention grounded in its founder’s idea of copying nothing.

Cracker Barrel provided the 2025 example. In August the restaurant chain replaced its logo, which showed an old man leaning on a barrel, with a text-only version. After several days of public backlash, it announced that the new logo was going away and the Old Timer would remain. Its shares rose about seven percent that day.

The 2025 to 2026 counter-trend

The counter-trend actually started earlier. In January 2021 Burger King introduced a logo inspired by the one it used from 1969 to 1999: a burger bun around the name, in warmer, brighter colours. Reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and the move made retro identity respectable again for large brands instead of a gimmick for small ones.

Burberry reversed its own course in February 2023. Under a new creative director, it brought back the equestrian knight, first chosen in a public competition in 1901, and paired it with a serif wordmark. Pepsi unveiled a bolder mark in March 2023, its first change in fourteen years, with heavier lettering and black alongside its familiar blue.

By 2025 and 2026 the swing was clear. Google made a softened four-colour gradient G its company-wide icon in September 2025, describing it as a reflection of its evolution in the AI era. On April 1, 2026, Apple marked fifty years with a rainbow apple on its homepage, a nostalgic tribute rather than a permanent change.

Part of the shift came from type itself. Custom typefaces became cheaper to commission and easier to license for screens, so a brand no longer needed a stock sans-serif to look sharp on a phone. Variable fonts, supported by the major browsers by the late 2010s, let one family stretch from compact app labels to wide billboard headlines.

The common thread is character over neutrality. Brands are adding back illustration, custom lettering, colour blends and references to their own pasts. That is not a rejection of simplicity. Most of the new marks are still clean and screen-friendly; they simply carry one distinctive feature again, as the Bass triangle and the Apple bite always did.

How to read a logo’s evolution

When you look at a timeline of a brand’s marks, four questions help. Did the outline change, or only the colour and detail? Did the name appear, disappear or shrink? Did the type move from serif to sans-serif or back? And what happened to the company in the same year: a merger, a new owner, a product launch?

The fourth question usually explains the first three. Starbucks went green the year Il Giornale bought it. Apple dropped its stripes the year of the first translucent iMac. Pepsi added black as it pushed a sugar-free cola. A logo change is a public signal, and the business story behind it is usually more telling than the drawing.

It also helps to separate redraws from refreshes. A redraw changes the shape people recognize; a refresh adjusts colour, weight or spacing inside the same shape. Most changes reported as a new logo are refreshes. The long-term creative timeline shows how rarely the really famous marks went through a true redraw.

Famous logos by colour, shape and letterform

Colour is the most changeable element. Red and yellow dominate food brands, from the McDonald’s arches to many pizza chains, while blue dominates technology and finance. Brands rarely abandon their core colour; they change shade, add a secondary colour or drop a third. Coca-Cola red and Starbucks green have survived every redesign.

Shape is the most durable. Triangles, circles, arches, curves and single objects such as an apple or a siren outlast almost everything around them. Letterforms sit in between. Scripts tend to survive because they are hard to replace without losing personality, while sans-serif wordmarks are redrawn often, sometimes every decade, as fashions in type move on.

The ten marks covered in this section show all three patterns. Pepsi has redrawn its globe more often than most, as the Pepsi globe page shows, while Google has changed its colours and type within a fixed set of four hues, explored on the Google colours page. Both keep their core palette while everything else moves.

Which approach will look right in 2036? Nobody knows. The marks that last, though, rarely belong to the brands that chased the latest style. They belong to the ones that found a shape early, protected it for decades and changed only what the moment required, like the Bass triangle still sitting on a bottle 150 years after registration.