LogoArchive

By the 1970s, James Modarelli’s 1959 NASA ‘meatball’ was seen as a relic of the past, a cumbersome design that didn’t fit the sleek and modern image NASA wanted to project. It was complicated, hard to reproduce and, in the words of Danne, ‘born out of the classic “airman syndrome” where hype and fantasy dominated over logic and reality’. In 1974, through the Federal Design Improvement Program, Danne & Blackburn, a small New York design studio of five at the time, got the job of bringing NASA’s image right up to date. Their answer was radical for its time: a sleek, red typographic treatment of the word ‘NASA’. Its consistent line weight and curvilinear forms earned it the nickname ‘the worm’, and the absence of crossbars on the A’s alluded to the nose cones of two rockets pointing upward. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/nasa-log…

Like the rail networks of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, post-war Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) faced the pressures of private car ownership and the commercialisation of air travel. Its own research found the network was seen by some as ‘stagnant’, ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘slightly old fashioned’. In 1967 the young design company Tel Design was selected to modernise its image. When numerous designs built on the initials NS failed to capture ‘progressiveness’ and ‘powerfulness’, Gert Dumbar (who would later found Studio Dumbar) pursued an abstract approach, no longer constrained by the initials. Through extensive trial and refinement, the logo underwent many small adjustments to the arrow angle, line thickness and the volume of the negative space, with Univers 65 adopted as its single typeface. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/gert-dum…

In the 1960s, the jet age was leaving airlines’ literal emblems behind. American Airlines had invested heavily in new aircraft and introduced the first electronic booking system, and that commitment to modernisation extended to its corporate identity. Massimo Vignelli of Unimark International and Heinz Waibl stripped everything back to a single typeface, Haas Helvetica, and two colours, the national red and blue: a wordmark with no space between ‘American’ and ‘Airlines’, and two initials, AA, distinguished from one another only by colour. It was reduction gone too far for management and staff. A ‘revolt’ led by flight attendants demanded the return of the eagle American had used since 1934, so Henry Dreyfuss Associates drew a stylised eagle swooping down between the letters. Vignelli would concede that it “was not so bad”, and the identity lasted over 45 years. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/american…

Bilbao’s metro was first proposed in the 1920s, but a plan was only approved in 1987. The underground stations were awarded to Sir Norman Foster and partners after an open competition, and the architects then worked with Otl Aicher to develop a wayfinding system, visual language and logo. Rather than focus on an ‘M’, Otl Aicher favoured an abstract form based on the notion of tunnels and wheels in motion: three overlapping rings of gradually increasing weight from left to right, giving an impression of forward momentum and complementing Foster’s ring-like station entrances. “Otl’s skill was somehow encapsulating the spirit of the idea or a place with a combination of line, colour, graphics,” said Norman Foster. Alongside Munich Airport, Metro Bilbao was Aicher’s last major commission before his death in 1991, and it remains largely unchanged. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/metro-bi…

When Siemens AG was formed in 1966, it inherited what its own historians describe as “branding chaos”. Rather than commission something new, it promoted the Siemens & Halske mark – Hans Domizlaff’s S&H monogram above the SIEMENS word mark – to umbrella mark for the whole group, and reinterpreted the monogram as the “House of Siemens”. By 1970 the mark looked dated and was hard to read at small sizes. Rather than settle the question on taste, Siemens asked the psychologist Reinhold Bergler to test eight new logotype variants. Test subjects still read the monogram as Siemens & Halske, and found the advertising managers’ favourite, a dotted “i”, poorly legible, faddish and facetious. On 1 October 1973 Siemens dropped the monogram entirely and made the SIEMENS name, in the same lettering as before, the company mark. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/siemens-…

Hands from the archive. Discover thousands more historical logos at logo-archive.org?utm_source=… By Eduardo A. Canovas (Foto Import, Argentina, 1985), Gill Plasse (Service de Réadaptation Social Inc., Canada, 1969), David Hillman (Royal College of Nursing, UK, 1984) and Enric Satué (Editorial Estela, Spain, 1971). #logos #branding #symbols #hands #logodesign

By the mid-century, Canadian National Railways had replaced steam with diesel, upgraded its fleet and restructured. Yet a study of 4,000 Canadians found the improvements were going unnoticed: the public still saw the railway as old-fashioned. Jim Valkus was brought in to close the gap, and handed the logo to Canadian designer Allan Fleming. On a flight to New York, Fleming sketched ideas on a cocktail napkin, joining the C and N into one continuous line. “It’s a route line that incidentally spells CN,” he explained. “It represents the movement of people, materials, and messages from one point to another.” The flowing ‘signature logo’, later known as the CN ‘Worm’, was a risk and a departure from the railway heralds of the past. In the words of Lorne Perry, who rolled out the programme, it became “a powerful moving billboard for CN’s powerful trains”. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/canadian…

Owls from the archive. Discover thousands more historical logos at logo-archive.org?utm_source=… By Ernst Roch (Owl Bar, Canada, 1973), Hiroyuki Kinoshita (Okinawa Fuji Hotel, Japan, 1973), Akiteru Nakajima (Art and Graphic, Japan, 1981) and Miloš Ćirić (Biblioteka Savremena Društvena Misao, Yugoslavia, 1969). #logos #branding #symbols #owl #logodesign

By the 1980s HongkongBank was considered a pioneer of modern banking in a number of countries, however, its corporate identity didn’t reflect this. Expansion to over 1,000 branches and a controlling stake in New York’s Marine Midland Bank started to create consistency issues. The bank appeared less unified the more it grew. Henry Steiner drew from the bank’s cross-cultural foundation, a British institution founded on ‘sound Scottish banking principles’ that had always adopted local beliefs and traditions. His logo grouped four isosceles triangles into a hexagon that could be read as inward and outward facing arrows pointing east and west, with the ‘X’ at its centre evoking the Saltire, the flag of Scotland. Rather than the blue of the Scottish flag, the logo would be a vibrant red, a colour important to Chinese culture and already used on the bank’s money boxes and passbooks. In the spirit of feng shui, its four arrows were presented to management as the four poles, and business coming from all directions. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/hsbc-log…

Having accumulated a growing amount of debt the national railway of Japan was privatised in 1987 and split into seven for-profit railway companies. Rather than each company having its own logo, it was decided that a single new visual identity for the network should be designed and applied all at once. Nippon Design Center was commissioned on November 28, 1986, the same day that the privatisation bill was passed, giving designer Yoji Yamamoto less than 124 days to deliver. More than 100 concepts were submitted, including 'NR' monograms, the rails of the passenger companies in symbolic form like British Rail, and a numerical device. The final design combined the letters J and R to form a single continuous line. Yamamoto suggested that trains move in both directions, so he designed the letters so that it would not feel strange seeing these move to the right or left. To improve legibility at high speed, the letters were made intentionally wider, giving the impression of speed even when static. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/japan-ra…

By the close of the 1980s, the Japanese financial sector was entering a period of structural change. For Toho Bank, the principal regional bank of Fukushima Prefecture, this period coincided with an approaching milestone. In 1991 the bank would mark its 50th anniversary, and it chose to treat the occasion not simply as a commemoration but as an opportunity to define a new institutional identity for the twenty-first century. Before any visual work began, Toho Bank surveyed around 4,000 employees, clients and members of the public to shape its new corporate philosophy. Shinji Harada’s TOHO Square divides a square into four lettered quadrants, referring to the square as a public space and the bank as a meeting place for its community. Five corporate colours, including an unusual pink, each represent an aspect of Fukushima Prefecture, from its skies and landscape to the vitality of its people. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/toho-ban…

When Japan’s Sanyo Sogo Bank transitioned from a mutual savings and loan bank into a commercial bank in 1989, it used the moment to announce a new, more progressive and friendlier way to bank, with a bold new name: Tomato Bank. Rather than writing Tomato Bank, Shigeo Katsuoka used an image of a tomato and the word bank to form a simple rebus. A playful pictogram of a bright red tomato topped with a radial, star-like green calyx delivered an immediacy and familiarity, but also, in its abstraction, created a highly functional asset that could be easily scaled. Read the full story behind the logo → logohistories.com/p/tomato-b…

The Lufthansa logo began life as the symbol of airline Deutsche Luft-Reederei, which was established in 1917 and began operations two years later in 1919. In the intervening year of 1918, between its establishment and the beginning of commercial flights Professor Otto Firle designed the stylised and iconic crane in flight symbol. Light and aerodynamic, the symbol delivered an efficient and elegant visual gesture, either alone, or sitting over the outline of sun or globe, bronze on blue. In 1926 the German government forced the airline to merge with Junkers Luftverkehr, forming Deutsche Luft Hansa (Deutsche Lufthansa from 1933), which was the flag carrier of the Weimar Republic. This new airline took with it the crane. At the end of WWII, following the defeat of Nazi Germany; all services of Deutsche Lufthansa were terminated. In 1953, in an effort to create a new national airline, and while West Germany had not yet been granted sovereignty over its airspace, Luftag was founded and started ordering new planes. It also acquired the name and logo of the liquidated Deutsche Lufthansa. On 1 April 1955 Lufthansa won approval to start scheduled domestic flights. Between 1923 and the 1960s, the symbol would vary slightly in its drawing depending on its application, and was paired with different typefaces and different blue. Otl Aicher It wasn’t until 1963, during a period of expansion and modernisation, which introduced the jet engine to the Lufthansa fleet, that the logo was formalised and a new visual developed under the direction of German designer Otl Aicher. Before settling on an update, various degrees of abstraction, between a crane and an arrow were explored. In the final design, small details such as a slightly heavier line weight, square terminals, and improved negative space rationalised the logo, increasing its flexibility across a growing number and diversity of applications. In the spirt of the time, and under the influence of modernism and the Swiss International Style, Helvetica was used to construct the Lufthansa wordmark and became part of the design policy. Although the yellow and blue pre-dated Otl Aicher’s system, a warmer yellow was introduced as a way to feel more welcoming as more people began flying. Martin et Karczinski In 2018, the “Lufthansa Blue” project saw the airline’s yellow and blue tailfins replaced with just a deep blue for a more premium feel with yellow being used only as small accents elsewhere. Helvetica was dropped for the digital era and replaced with a custom typeface. Even after historical upheavals, the crane remains in, with only slight updates by Martin et Karczinski.

The archive has gotten big, now over 5500 logos, curated and individually drawn, and cross referenced. To expand discovery, we’ve added new nifty little matrix to play with - see what you think. 👉 logo-archive.org

Some of my favourite modernist logos in colour. Find these and hundreds more at logo-archive.org #logos #design #branding #designhistory #logoarchive