Logo

HISTORY

During the Second Crusade, Richard I wore a conspicuous cross on his tunic. The English king and his fellow crusaders were the first "team" to wear sponsor's logos on their chests.

In 1787 the Twinings Tea logo was unveiled by the tea company. A capitalized font beneath a lion crest, it is still in use and remains the world's oldest unaltered logo.

In 1876 the Bass Red Triangle became the first logo to be trademarked in the United Kingdom. It was the first trademark to be registered under the UK's Trade Mark Registration Act 1875, which came into effect on January 1, 1876. Legend has it that a Bass employee queued overnight outside the registrar's office on New Year's Eve in order to be the first in line to register a trademark the next morning. The logo became so popular that James Joyce explicitly mentioned it in his novel Ulysses.

The Detroit Tigers became the first baseball club in 1901 to have a logo on their cap - an orange running tiger.

Although the McDonald's "Golden Arches" logo appeared in various forms, the present version as a letter "M" did not appear until November 18, 1968, when the company applied for a U.S. trademark.

The Nike "swoosh" logo was created in 1971 by a graphic design student and was purchased by Nike for $35.

The use of a heart shape in a logo to signify love was popularized by graphic designer Milton Glaser in his 1977 I [heart] New York poster and T-shirt campaign.

FUN FACTS

In a 1995 worldwide survey regarding the public recognition of various symbols, the five rings logo of the International Olympic Movement came out top with a 92% recognition rate, the fast food chain McDonald's "M" scored 88% and the Christian Cross a mere 54%.

The red-and-white Coca-Cola logo is recognized by 94 per cent of the world.

Bluetooth was named after Harald Bluetooth a tenth century King of Denmark 1000 years ago. The bluetooth logo is made from the Nordic runes of his initials.

The Facebook logo is blue because of founder Mark Zuckerberg's color blindness. He explained to the New Yorker that blue is the "richest" color he can see.

The original Xbox logo was green because the artist in charge of designing it didn't have any other colored marker left.

Starbucks has a different logo for Saudi Arabia because the normal logo shows too much female flesh.

The Mercedes-Benz logo is a three-pronged star meant to symbolize universal motorization. The three prongs stand for land, water and air.

The player silhouetted in the NBA logo is former all-star Jerry West, who played with the Lakers (1960–1974).

The official name of Twitter's logo is Larry the bird. It's named after Hall of Fame NBA player, Larry Bird.

The man on the Pringles logo has a name. It's Julius Pringles.

The logo of the Royal New Zealand Air Force is the Kiwi, a flightless bird.

The Subaru logo represents the stars in Pleiades constellation which is known as 'Subaru' in Japanese.

The mountain in the Paramount Pictures logo is a real mountain named "Artesonraju" in Peru, and not simply an artist's depiction of a mountain.

Wikipedia

AirBnB, Beats, Flipboard, Hootsuite and Medium all lifted their logos from the same 1989 design flip-book, Trademarks and Symbols of the World: The Alphabet of Design.

The average American 3-year-old can recognize about 100 brand logos.

The average child recognizes over 200 company logos by the time he enters first grade.