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FAQs What is the Evolution of big Tech Company’s Logos?
| What is the Evolution of big Tech Company’s Logos? |
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How have Tech Companies’ Logos Evolved?Sources: Everyone is used to seeing these logos everywhere but have you ever posed the question of how they became? How did they get to where they are now? For example the original logo for Apple was the Isaac Newton under an apple tree and the original logo for Nokia was a fish! How they did they evolve from there to what we are used to seeing now? We will have a structured look now to see how these logos have evolved over the years... Apple Inc.
It all started back in 1976 when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs ("the two Steves") designed and built a homemade computer called the Apple I. At this time Wozniak was working for Hewlett Packard and so they decided to give HP first refusal but to their surprise they were turned down! In order to continue the progress of their research and designs they needed to find alternative finance. Wozniak and Jobs did this by selling some of their own personal possessions some of them very valued ones for example Wozniak sold his programmable HP calculator and Jobs sold his old Volkswagen to finance the further design and realisation of the Apple I motherboards. Later on that year, Wozniak completed the further creation of the next generation machine: Apple II prototype. They started by offering this to Commodore and were again turned down. But the bright side is that the company began to gain customers with its computers. Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree was the first Apple company logo. The slogan accompanying the logo read: "Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone." This logo was desgined by Ronald Wayne who together with Wozniak and Jobs founded the Apple Computer. In 1976, Wayne sold his stock of 10% of the company for a one of payment of $800 thinking that Apple was too risky. This decision he made after only working for two weeks at Apple. Regrettable decision as that stock now would have been worth billions of dollars! Blaming the slow down of sales of The Apple I on the possibility that the original logo was too complex Rob Janoff was asked to design a new Apple logo. The Janoff design was the world recognised rainbow striped Apple logo used from 1976 to 1999. The bite on the Apple logo was apparently in remembrance of Alan Turing, the renowned modern computer scientist who committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. When questioned about his, Janoff, said that although he was aware of the "byte/bite" pun (Apple’s slogan was "Byte into an Apple"), he designed the logo to "prevent the apple from looking like a cherry tomato." (Source) In 1998, Apple replaced the rainbow logo ("the most expensive logo ever designed" said Mike Scott, Apple President) with a modern-looking, monochrome logo. Adobe Systems
CanonIn 1982, John Warnock and Charles Geschke quit their jobs at Xerox. Their reason? To start a software company which they called Adobe. It was named this after a stream that ran behind Warnock’s home. Their goal was to create PostScript, a programming language to be used in desktop publishing. After the initial establishment of Adobe, Warnock and Geschke economised and did everything they could to save money. Even asking their friends and family and asking Geschke’s 80-year-old father for stained wood that they could use for shelving. In fact it was Warnock’s wife Marva that designed Adobe’s first logo.
In 1930, Goro Yoshida and his brother-in-law Saburo Uchida created Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory in Japan. In 1934, they created their first camera, called the Kwanon. The name Kwanon, they took af the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. The chosen logo would include an image of Kwanon with 1,000 arms and flames. Perhaps this spelling would not be the easiest to remember so the company registered the same sounding name but with different spelling. The famous world renowned "Canon" as a trademark was registered. This precise sounding name would be characteristic of the company and the goods that it is known associated with.
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin computer science graduate students at Stanford University built a search engine that would later become known as Google. The search engine was called BackRub. It was called Backrub due to its ability to analyse "back links" to determine a particular website. The search engine was later renamed by them as Google a play on the word Googol (meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros).
In 1998 Larry and Sergey went to Internet portals these were dominating the web at that time but couldn’t find anyone interested in their technology. So in the same year they started Google, Inc. in a friend’s garage, and the rest is history. Google’s first logo was created by Sergey Brin. Sergery Brin used the free graphic software GIMP and taught himself how to use it and came up with the logo. Later mimicking the Yahoo! logo an exclamation mark was added. In 1999 Ruth Kedar, an Consultant Art Professor at Standford Ruth Kedar designed the Google logo that the company uses today.
To mark holidays, birthdays of famous people and major events, Google uses specially drawn logos known as the Google Doodles. The very first Google Doodle was a reference to the Burning Man Festival in 1999. Larry and Sergey put a little stick figure on the home page to let people know why no one was in the office in case the website crashed! Now, Dennis Hwang regularly draws the Google Doodles. IBM
In 1911, the International Time Recording Company (Established in 1888) and the Computing Scale Company (Established in 1891) merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR, see where IBM gets its penchant for three letter acronym?). Later in 1924, the company adopted the name International Business Machines Corporation and with it, a new modern-looking logo. The variety of business machines that it made included employee time-keeping systems, weighing scales, meat slicers, and punched-card tabulators. In the late 1940's, IBM began a difficult transition. They started punched-card tabulating to computers, led by its CEO Thomas J. Watson. In 1947 this change was noted by IBM changing its logo for the first time in over two decades. It would now be a simple typeface logo. In 1956, Watson’s son, Paul Rand took over the company and changed IBM’s logo to "a more solid, grounded and balanced appearance". He also ensured that the change made was sufficiently subtle to show continuity between the change over from father to son. IBM last big logo change was in 1972 by Paul Rand. The change was not that big but the solid letters were repalced with horizontal stripes giving a feeling of speed and dynamism. Microsoft
In 1975, Paul Allen, working at Honeywell and his friend Bill Gates a sophomore at Harvard University saw a new Altair 8800 of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or MITS. This was the first mini personal computer available commercially. Allen and Gates decided to port the computer language BASIC for the computer. They managed to accomplish this in just 24 hours producing the first computer language written for a personal computer. At this point they approached MITS and licensed BASIC to the company. Just after, Allen and Gates named their partnership "Micro-soft". Later that year the name was used without using the hyphen. In 1977 Microsoft became an official company and the general partners would be Allen and Gates. The logo history A new logo for Microsoft was announced in 1982. It would comprise of a distinctive "O" that employees called the "Blibbet." Again the logo was changed in 1987 a Microsoft employee Larry Osterman launched a "Save the Blibbet" campaign but it did not work. Apparently at this time, the Microsoft cafeteria even served a "Blibbet Burger," a double cheeseburger with bacon. In 1987, the current Pac-Man logo was designed for Microsoft by Scott Baker. The new logo has a slash on the ‘O’ that made it look like Pac-Man. In 1994 a new slogan was introduced Where do you want to go today?. This slogan as part of a $100 million advertising campaign. It goes without saying that it was widely mocked. In 1996, after being at the receiving end of many jokes such as "what kind of error messages would you like today?", Microsoft dropped the slogan. Later, it tried new slogans such as "Making It Easier", "Start Something", "People Ready" and "Open Up Your Digital Life". They decided for the time being to settle on the current slogan of "Your potential. Our passion." Do you know the Microsoft’s original slogan? It was "Microsoft: What’s a microprocessor without it?" … Microsoft’s very first advertising campaign "Microsoft- What’s a microprocessor without it?" could be used to create software that would take advantage of the early microprocessors. The first advertisement in this campaign appeared in a 1976 issue of a microchip journal called Digital Design. This featured a black-and-white cartoon with the title "The Legend of Micro-Kid." The cartoon depicted a small microchip character as a boxer who possessed speed and power but quickly tired out because he had no real training. The other character, a trainer related the story of how the Micro-Kid had a great future but needed a manager, such as himself, in order to succeed. (source: PC Today) Motorola
Motorola was started in 1928 by Paul Galvin as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. In the 1930s, Galvin started manufacturing car radios. He created the name ‘Motorola’ a combination of the word ‘motor’ and the then-popular suffix ‘ola.’ In 1947 the company changed its name to Motorola Inc. Later in the 1980s, the company started making mobile phones commercially. The "M" insignia was designed in 1955 and the company called it "emsignia". A company leader said that "the two aspiring triangle peaks arching into an abstracted ‘M’ typified the progressive leadership-minded outlook of the company." (I’m serious, look up the logo-speak here: Motorola History) Mozilla Firefox
In 2002, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross created an open-source web browser that became Mozilla Firefox. It was first called Phoenix, but this name had trademark issues and so it was changed to Firebird. Unfortunately again, the new name experienced problems due to an existing software. Their third try succeeded - the web browser was re-named Mozilla Firefox. In 2003, Steven Garrity,a professional interface designer wrote found that the browser and other software from Mozilla suffered from poor branding issues. Shortly afterwards, Mozilla asked Garrity to develop a new visual identity for Firefox which would include the now famous logo. Update 2/7/08: I goofed on this one, guys: it was John Hicks of Hicksdesign that actually made the Firefox logo, designed from a concept from Daniel Burka and sketched by Stephen Desroches - Thanks Jacob Morse and Aaron Bassett! Nokia
In 1865, Knut Fredrik Idestam established a wood-pulp mill in Tampere, south-western Finland. The mill adopted the name Nokia after moving the mill to the banks of the Nokianvirta river in the town of Nokia. The word "Nokia" in Finnish means a dark, furry animal also known as the Pine Marten weasel. Nokia Corporation was the result of a merger in 1967 between Finnish Rubber Works (which also used a Nokia brand), the Nokia Wood Mill, and the Finnish Cable Works. Nokia produced paper products, bicycle and car tires, shoes, television, electricity generators before targeting their telecommunications and cell phones goods. Xerox
Xerox Corporation started with Haloid Company, founded in 1906 which manufactured photographic paper and equipment. In 1938, Chester Carlson invented a photocopying technique called electrophotography. This was later renamed xerography. Carlson was persistent and he experimented for 15 years even through a debilitating back pain while also going to law school and working his other job. Unfortunately not unlike other inventions at that time, this was not well received. He was too far ahead for his time! Carlson spent years trying to convince General Electric, IBM, RCA, and other companies to invest in his invention but no one was interested. Then he went to the Haloid company. They helped him develop the world’s first photocopier, the Haloid Xerox 914. This copier were so successful that in 1961, Xerox dropped the Haloid from its name. In 2004, Xerox tried to re-invent itself (complete with a new logo) following a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Later in 2008, it produce a new image that it’s not only a copier company and adopted a new logo. The now, true to say people do not think only of copiers when they see the new logo.             
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