Today there are many corporations, products, brands, services, agencies and other entities using an ideogram (sign, icon) or an emblem (symbol) or a combination of sign and emblem as a logo. However, only a few of the thousands of ideograms people see are recognized without a name. Logo Designs changed over time, let’s see some samples and how the changed.

Let’s look at the history and evolution of the well-known logo designs. If you are a logo designer, I bet you will learn a lot from their mistakes, and a long path of improvements until they’ve reached the final design. If you are not designer – don’t worry, this will be at least very entertaining for you. Let’s look a little on brands like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple or Shell. Some logos evolved due to the change of an organization, like a merger or consolidating even brands.

One example is Audi the famous car brand from Germany. Audi was formed out of 4 different car manufacturer Audi, Horch, DKW and Wanderer. Each of the 4 rings is presenting one of this.

If we look at the time of fine art logo designs like Pepsi, Apple, IBM, Canon, Playboy or Microsoft we can see the trend to lesser colors and simpler patterns.

We can not see a trend but logo designs have been simplified over time to be easier recognized and unique presenting their brand. 

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Today we know that colors play a major role to reach peoples emotion. If companies are undergoing a rebranding they still try to avoid to change the colors which they stand for. 

Pepsi Logo History

Manufactured and marketed by PepsiCo, it was first developed and produced in the early 1890’s by Caleb Bradham, a pharmacist in New Bern, North Carolina labeled as “Brad’s drink”. In 1898, Bradham renamed his drink into “Pepsi-Cola”. In 1898, Bradham used a scribbled logo script as the first Pepsi logo to brand the product.

When his business got established and people started enjoying his drink, Bradham decided to modify the Pepsi logo into a more customized version of the previous logo script. Thus, in 1905, a modified script logo was introduced, followed by a second change in Pepsi logo in 1906 with the inclusion of the slogan, “The Original Pure Food Drink”, in it. By 1943, the Pepsi logo adopted a “bottle cap” look that included the slogan, “Bigger Drink, Better Taste”. Later, in 1962, the Pepsi logo was replaced with two bulls-eye marks encircling “Pepsi”, and then again in 1973, into a boxed Pepsi logo with minor typeface changes. In 1991, Pepsi commemorated the evolution of its scripted Pepsi logo by featuring a logo design with an italic capital typeface.

Later at the company’s 100 years celebration in 1998, Pepsi-Cola unveiled a new logo that symbolized the brand’s innovation and global recognition.

Coca Cola’s 124 years Journey

Coca-Cola was first served in 1886 and even then, the first official logo of Coca-Cola was not the script logo. It first appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1886 as both a slab serif and chunky sans serif – it wasn’t until mid-1887 that Frank Robinson, Coca-Cola’s bookkeeper, drew the first traces of the Spencerian script logo that we all know.

For the first ten to twenty years you could probably find a dozen different executions of the Coca-Cola script as the logo was probably drawn over and over for different applications. It isn’t until the 1930s and 1940s that a clear interpretation of the logo appears and is used consistently. During the late 1950s and early 1960s the script logo is placed within a shape, referred to as the “fishtail” logo, which is as off-brand as anything that Coca-Cola has ever done. In 1960’s the wave was introduced, a ubiquitous visual today, when Lippincott Mercer was in charge of making the Coca-Cola identity more consistent.

“New Coke”  introduced in 1985 had a new formula marketing and its own set of logos – that completely ignored the script logo – that left a bad taste in their consumers’ mouths. Around the same time, in 1986, Landor began rolling out an even more developed brand identity that modified the wave among other subtle changes.

Today’s Coca-Cola logo is amazingly similar to what it was 124 years ago.

Did you know how Canon was formed

The origin of today’s world-famous brand Canon can be traced in Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory that was established back in 1933. The first set of cameras was manufactured as a part of the business trial and these early birds were named Kwanon after the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy.

Now this Goddess was the possessor of thousand arms and spat flames. From the very beginning, the company worked with an ambition of reaching out to the outer world and as such the company wanted to adopt a name that will be accepted globally. With this intention, the company name was changed from Kwanon to Canon and it was registered as the logo trademark name of the company in the year 1935.

Logo Designs a million Dollar business

Just three samples of logo designs history which show what changed over the time. However let’s not forget, logos shall be representing a brand and shall make it easier for customers to identify them only from its look without actually naming the brand.

Brands like Apple lead the Forbes list of the most valuable brand in the world. The brand itself estimated value is $ 170B (as of 2017 list from Forbes) without actually naming the company. Under top 10 in the Forbes list only 4 companies do not present their name in the logo.

Looking at the costs of logo designs we see a complete range. Pepsi spend 2008 for the redesign $ 1,000,000 while Google who’s logo reaches back to it’s founding member Sergey Brin who designed it with the free tool Gimp $0. Google logo was a little adjusted over time but stayed with the same concept.

The famous Coca-Cola logo was created by John Pemberton’s bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, in 1885 which means it was created with $0. Robinson came up with the name and chose the logo’s distinctive cursive script. The typeface used, known as Spencerian script, was developed in the mid-19th century and was the dominant form of formal handwriting in the United States during that period.

See the infographic of 15 logo designs which envolved over time which don’t need to be introduced.