What's in a Logo? Recognizable and Memorable Company Logos

Logos are symbols or designs that companies and organizations adopt for identifying their products, vehicles, uniforms, and other paraphernalia. The best designs are simple and easily recognizable without the need for a company name or other text. They are often made up of a single color perhaps with white or black as a background or contrast.

My own high school sports teams used a cardinal head as their logo. Back in the day, two girls (one was my next-door neighbor) dressed up as the mascots. My job was to make the cardinal heads. They were constructed out of paper mâché, and I'm not sure how long they lasted!

When my daughter was in 6th-grade, we painted career logos on muslin squares that were then assembled into a quilt as a graduation gift for the teacher. Students had to decide then and there what they wanted to do as an adult and design something that symbolized the job. My daughter wanted to be a Disney Imagineer. Instead, she turned out to be a Genome Scientist. Maybe the rollercoaster tracks were genetic helixes and the mouse ears a lab rat. Ha!

One of the most recognizable logos is the Olympic rings. It is simply 5 different colored circles, each representing a different region of the world. Do you know which ring/color represents your country's continent? Blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Oceania (Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia), and red for (North and South) America. 

Only Antarctica is not represented.

Perhaps the two simplest and most familiar company logos belong to McDonald's and Target. Both companies are pretty much worldwide entities. The golden arches and the red-and-white bullseye logos are globally recognized. These one-and two-color logos have made their mark on the world using simple shapes that are firmly planted in our brains and no longer need to be accompanied by their company names. 

Even their mascots -- Ronald McDonald and Bullseye the Dog -- are easily identifiable and endearing to the kids who eat Happy Meals, enjoy indoor playgrounds, and love to shop for their favorite toys.

Who can forget the Starbucks mermaid logo? Now only green and white, the twin-tailed creature is the perfect symbol to represent the coffee icon's city of origin -- Seattle -- located between (saltwater) Puget Sound and (freshwater) Lake Washington. So, a mermaid sporting two tails makes a lot of sense. Now that I've explained it, that is!

Recently, a new Seattle-based professional hockey team logo emerged onto the sports scene as the Kracken. It is a stylized letter 'S', like baseball's Seattle Mariners logo, but with a squid-like tail splining up through its middle toward a menacing red eye. It reminds me of the neon green eye in football's Seattle Seahawks logo. Good use of positive-negative space!

Whether you're a PC or Mac lover, the Windows and Apple logos clearly distinguish between the two. Curiously, both companies chose a rainbow of colors!

Shell Oil, Nike, and Toyota have unforgettable logos. Shell uses a yellow and red-outlined shell shape, Nike has its iconic swoosh, and Toyota uses a couple of elliptical shapes arranged to form a letter 'T'.

While three ovals form the Toyota logo, four circles make up the Audi symbol. The previously named Auto Union is the combination of the four German car companies that banded together to form a union and eventually became 'Audi'.

Mercedes-Benz might be perceived as an evil scientist if you knew what its symbol meant. Apparently, the three-pronged sign represents land, sea, and air domination. One more spoke and they would have made peace!

Other less-creative automotive companies use stylized letters as their logos, such as VW, Acura, and Honda. Even the McDonald's arches form an 'M'.

Some logos when not accompanied by their company name don't make much sense. For example, the Kroger Gas logo and the CHI Franciscan logo. The Kroger colors represent its 4 chains with the (negative) white space meant to be the United States (only in 42 states). The inside of the CHI logo is a cross symbolizing the Catholic religion.

Here’s an online logo quiz that asks you to name the company solely based on the logo.

See my Shape Study post for more about organic and inorganic shapes.