Logo evolution:
20 famous logos, then and now

The table lists each logo's first known version, the decisive redesign and what was taken away. The column to watch is the last one.

Table: Famous logos, their first version and the decisive redesign (company records and trade press; see sources)

Students who drew the Apple logo correctly from memory

1 in 85

What Nike paid for the swoosh in 1971

$35

Fall in Tropicana unit sales after its 2009 redesign

20%

Age of Coca-Cola's script, almost unchanged

140 years

Logos get simpler because the places they must work keep shrinking, and because human memory keeps only the outline anyway. Both pressures point the same way, which is why companies with very different tastes made the same decision within a few years of each other.

Reason 1: the 16-pixel test

A 1900 logo had to survive on an enamel sign, a delivery van and a newspaper advertisement. A 2026 logo has to survive as a browser favicon (16 to 32 pixels), an app icon on a phone, a notification badge and a smartwatch face. At those sizes a one-pixel line either disappears or blurs into its neighbours. Watch what happens to fine detail as a mark shrinks:

Reason 2: memory keeps the gist, not the detail

In 2015 psychologists Adam Blake, Meenely Nazarian and Alan Castel at UCLA asked 85 students, both Apple and PC users, to draw the Apple logo from memory. Only one drew it correctly, and fewer than half could pick the real logo out of a line-up of near-copies⁴. People had seen the logo thousands of times. They had stored what it was (an apple, with a bite, roughly that shape), not how it was drawn. Any detail beyond the gist is detail that customers never encode.

Reason 3: familiarity breeds liking

Robert Zajonc showed in 1968 that repeated exposure to a neutral shape makes people rate it more favourably, the "mere exposure effect"⁶. Later research on processing fluency adds that shapes the brain decodes quickly feel more familiar and more trustworthy. A simple logo is decoded faster, so every exposure does more work. This is why a redesign that keeps the old silhouette (Pepsi 2023, Shell 1971) usually goes smoothly, and one that discards it (Gap 2010) does not. It is also why products lean on recognition over recall: people find what they already know.

Each entry gives the dated changes and, where a freely licensed archive image exists, the logo then and now. Logos are trademarks of their owners and are shown for commentary and history.

Coca-Cola (1886)

The oldest logo here barely changed. Frank Mason Robinson, bookkeeper and partner of the pharmacist John Pemberton, suggested the name and wrote it in Spencerian script, the standard business handwriting of 1880s America, in 1886¹. The script was trademarked and has been tidied, not redrawn. The white "dynamic ribbon" under it arrived in 1969. Coca-Cola is the strongest argument that a distinctive asset, once owned, should not be touched.

Shell (1900)

Shell's own history says the first trademark, registered in 1900, was a black-and-white mussel shell; a scallop (pecten) replaced it by 1904². The pecten was formalised in 1930, the word Shell entered it in 1948, and in 1971 the industrial designer Raymond Loewy drew the clean, symmetrical shell still in use. The current red and yellow arrived in the 1990s, and in 1999 Shell removed the name altogether. Each step removed something; none changed the silhouette.

Mercedes-Benz (1909)

Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft registered the three-pointed star in 1909. The points are usually explained as engines for land, sea and air. When Daimler merged with Benz & Cie in 1926, the star was set inside Benz's laurel wreath. The wreath later became a plain ring, and the star itself has been redrawn many times without changing its three points.

Olympic rings (1913)

Pierre de Coubertin drew the five interlaced rings in 1913, and they first flew on the Olympic flag at the 1920 Antwerp Games. Coubertin's reasoning was that the five colours plus the white background could reproduce the flag of every nation then competing. The modern version removed the thin rims that once outlined each ring.

Pepsi (1898)

Pharmacist Caleb Bradham's 1898 "Pepsi-Cola" was a spiky red script that tried to out-Coke Coke. The bottle-cap globe of the 1940s and 1950s became the modern red, white and blue circle in 1973. In 2008 the Arnell Group tilted the globe's white band into a "smile" and set the name in thin lowercase, a design widely mocked at the time. On 29 March 2023 Pepsi reversed course: a bold black PEPSI back inside the globe, deliberately recalling its 1987–1991 logo¹².

IBM (1924)

IBM adopted its name and a globe logo in 1924. Paul Rand, the designer most associated with modern corporate identity, redrew the letters as solid slab-serif forms in 1956, added 13 stripes in 1967, and settled on the eight-bar logo in 1972⁷. The stripes were meant to suggest "speed and dynamism" and also made the heavy letters feel lighter. IBM has not changed it since: more than 50 years.

McDonald's (1953)

The golden arches began as architecture: two yellow arches on the sides of the 1953 McDonald's restaurant design. In 1962 Jim Schindler sketched them overlapping into an M, and in 1968 the name was set across them. The logo is a rare case of a building becoming a symbol, which is why it reads well at any size.

Nike (1971)

In 1971 Phil Knight paid Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at Portland State University, $35 for a mark to put on the side of a shoe. Knight reportedly said he didn't love it but that it might grow on him. In 1983 the company gave Davidson a gold swoosh ring and an envelope of Nike stock³. The word "Nike" sat beside or over the swoosh until 1995, when the company began using the swoosh on its own. That move came 24 years after the swoosh appeared, once recognition no longer needed the name.

Starbucks (1971)

Starbucks' first logo, in 1971, was a brown ring of words around a twin-tailed siren adapted from a 16th-century Norse woodcut. In 1987, after the merger with Il Giornale, the colour turned green and the words "tea and spices" went. In 2011, the company's 40th year, Starbucks removed the ring of words entirely and enlarged the siren¹⁰. The current siren has a deliberate slight asymmetry in her face, added so she looks more human.

Apple (1976)

Apple's first logo, drawn by co-founder Ronald Wayne in 1976, was a pen-and-ink scene of Isaac Newton under an apple tree, framed with a Wordsworth quotation. It was unreadable at any size smaller than a page. Rob Janoff of the Regis McKenna agency replaced it in 1977 with a bitten apple in six colour stripes, made for the Apple II, the first Apple with colour graphics. Janoff has explained the bite as scale: without it the shape could be read as a cherry. In 1998, with the iMac, Apple replaced the rainbow with single-colour versions.

Apple, 1976 → 1977 → 1998

Microsoft (1975)

The 1975 "Micro-Soft" wordmark was set in stripy, retro letters. From 1987 Microsoft used a heavy italic wordmark with a notch in the "o", nicknamed the "Pac-Man" logo. On 23 August 2012 it introduced four coloured squares and the name in its Segoe typeface⁸. Microsoft said the squares stood for its range of products, and the flat style matched Windows 8.

FedEx (1994)

Federal Express became FedEx in 1994 with a logo by Lindon Leader at Landor Associates. Its fame comes from figure and ground: the white space between the E and the x forms an arrow. It is the textbook example of figure-ground perception. Designers have long claimed the arrow works on customers subconsciously. In 2023, researchers at National Taiwan University and the University of Hamburg tested that with four experiments. They found no evidence that people perceive the arrow unconsciously; it only changed where people looked once it was highlighted⁵.

Google (1997)

Google's first logo, in 1997, was made by Sergey Brin in the free graphics program GIMP. Designer Ruth Kedar refined it in 1999 using the Catull serif typeface and primary colours with one green letter, a small rule-break meant to say Google didn't follow rules. The shadows went flat in 2013, and on 1 September 2015 Google introduced a geometric sans-serif logo, explaining that it had to work across many screen sizes, down to tiny ones⁹.

Amazon (2000)

Amazon's 1995 logo was a stylised river, for the company's name. In 2000 Turner Duckworth designed the lowercase wordmark with an orange arrow that runs from the a to the z and doubles as a smile. It is a hidden-meaning mark like FedEx's, but one where the meaning (everything from A to Z) is visible on first look.

Mastercard (1966)

The interlocking red and yellow circles date from the late-1960s Master Charge card. A 1996 version added horizontal stripes where the circles overlap. In 2016 Pentagram, led by Michael Bierut and Luke Hayman, returned to two flat circles. In January 2019 Mastercard announced at CES that it would drop its name from the logo in most uses, because 80% of people recognised the symbol without it, according to the company¹¹.

Airbnb (2014)

Airbnb's first logo was a bubbly blue wordmark. In July 2014 the company launched the Bélo, designed with London agency DesignStudio, a single line that combines a location pin, a heart and an "A". Critics found rude shapes in it within hours; the brand survived, which is a useful reminder that launch-week mockery is not the same as long-term failure.

Instagram (2016)

Instagram launched in 2010 with an icon that looked like a brown Polaroid-style camera, a textbook piece of skeuomorphism. On 11 May 2016 it switched to a flat glyph of a camera over a purple-orange gradient. Many users hated it. The glyph is now one of the most recognised icons on any phone, a good example of how short-term dislike of change says little about long-term recognition.

Volkswagen and BMW (2019–2020)

German carmakers spent decades on chrome-effect, three-dimensional badges. Volkswagen unveiled a flat, thin-line VW at the Frankfurt motor show in September 2019, timed with its electric ID cars. BMW followed in March 2020 with a flat roundel whose outer ring is transparent, for digital use. Both kept the physical car badge three-dimensional; the flat versions are for screens.

Twitter to X (2023)

Twitter's bird went through several versions before the 2012 bird, built entirely from overlapping circles. In July 2023, after Elon Musk's takeover, the company renamed itself X and replaced the bird with a letter. It is the rare case in this list of a redesign that threw away the distinctive asset on purpose, because the owner wanted a different company, not a refreshed one.

Air India (2023)

After the Tata group took the airline back from the government in 2022, Air India unveiled a new identity on 10 August 2023, designed with FutureBrand. The symbol, "The Vista", is the peak of a gold window frame inspired by the arched windows of Indian architecture. It replaced the red swan with the Konark-style wheel that had been used since 2007. The Maharaja mascot was kept¹³.

Redesigns fail when they remove the cue customers actually use to find the product. The two best-documented failures removed exactly that.

Gap, October 2010. Gap replaced its tall white-on-navy "blue box" with Helvetica text and a small gradient square. After more than 2,000 critical comments on its Facebook page and widespread mockery, Gap's North America president announced the return of the blue box within about a week¹⁴.

Tropicana, January 2009. The redesign was packaging rather than a logo, but the lesson is the same. The new carton removed the orange with a straw in it. Unit sales of Tropicana Pure Premium fell 20% between 1 January and 22 February 2009, and the company brought back the old design¹⁵. Shoppers had been finding the product by that orange; without it, the carton looked like a store brand.

The brands that redesigned well followed a similar process, whether or not they wrote it down.

1. Audit what people remember — ask customers to describe or sketch the current logo from memory. What they draw is your distinctive asset; what they leave out is optional.
2. Test at the smallest size first — design the 16-pixel and app-icon versions before the billboard. If the mark fails small, it fails.
3. Remove one thing at a time — Shell took 99 years and five steps. A single, total change asks customers to relearn the brand.
4. Drop the name last — only when recognition of the symbol alone is proven, as Nike (1995) and Mastercard (2019) did.
5. Run a recognition test before launch — show the new logo briefly next to competitors and measure how fast people identify it, compared with the old one.
6. Plan the rollout — Pepsi rolled out in North America in 2023 and worldwide in 2024, so packaging, signage and digital changed in a planned order.

1. 1876

   Bass Brewery's red triangle

   Often cited as the first trademark registered under the UK's Trade Marks Registration Act 1875.

2. 1886

   Coca-Cola's script

   Frank Mason Robinson writes the name in Spencerian script.

3. 1900

   Shell's first trademark

   A mussel shell; a scallop replaces it by 1904.

4. 1913

   The Olympic rings

   Drawn by Pierre de Coubertin; first flown in 1920.

5. 1956–1972

   Paul Rand's IBM

   Solid letters, then 13 stripes, then eight bars.

6. 1971

   The Nike swoosh and the Shell pecten

   Davidson's $35 mark; Raymond Loewy's clean shell.

7. 1977

   The rainbow Apple

   Rob Janoff's bitten apple for the Apple II.

8. 1994

   FedEx

   The hidden arrow by Lindon Leader at Landor.

9. 2012

   Flat goes mainstream

   Microsoft's four squares, the same year as the flat iOS-style redesigns that followed.

10. 2016–2020

    The flat wave

    Instagram, Mastercard, Volkswagen and BMW flatten their marks for screens.

11. 2023

    Reversals and resets

    Pepsi returns to a bold wordmark; Twitter becomes X; Air India launches The Vista.

An app icon is a logo under the hardest conditions: 60 to 180 pixels on a phone, surrounded by 40 competing icons, glanced at for a fraction of a second. Every lesson above applies. Keep one strong shape, one or two colours, no words, and test it in a real home-screen screenshot, not on a white artboard. The same perception rules sit behind Gestalt principles and Jakob's law: people expect your icon to behave like the ones they already know.

If you are redesigning a live product's brand, treat it like any other change to a familiar interface: measure what users rely on before you remove it. That is the core of a mobile app UX audit.

Dates, designers and reasons come from each company's own history pages where they exist (Coca-Cola, Shell, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Starbucks), from contemporary trade press for launches, and from peer-reviewed journals for the psychology. Logo images are from Wikimedia Commons, where they are marked public domain as simple geometric or text marks; each image links to its file page. Logos remain trademarks of their owners. Where sources disagree on a date (for example, the year Mastercard's circles first appeared, given as 1966 or 1968), the range is stated. Last reviewed October 2026.