LOGO ORIGINS
You see these corporate logos everywhere, but did you ever wonder how they came to be? Wonder no more.
Company: Audi
Logo: Four interlocking rings
Meaning: The company—and its logo—are based on carmakers that had been around since the early 20th century. In 1932 two German car companies, DKW and Wanderer, merged with two others, Horch and Audi, to form the Auto Union. Both Horch and Audi were founded by engineer August Horch. (“Audi” is the Latin equivalent of the word horch, which is German for “listen.”) The rings in Audi’s logo represent those four car companies.
Company: Mercedes-Benz
Logo: A three-pointed star, with its points touching the inner rim of a circle
Meaning: Carmaker Gottlieb Daimler’s company, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, released a model called the Mercedes in 1901. In 1926 DMG merged with Karl Benz’s company to create Daimler-Benz, later Mercedes-Benz. The three points of the star represent the three things Daimler wanted to create machines to traverse: land, water, and air.
Company: Arby’s
Logo: A cowboy hat
Meaning: When Arby’s opened in the early 1960s, Westerns were all the rage on TV and at movie theaters. And what do we associate with cowpokes? Beef cattle. So when Arby’s opened in 1964, it marketed its hamburger alternative—roast beef sandwiches—with a giant cowboy hat atop all its restaurants. The extra-tall hat allowed room for a lot of copy, and in big letters the signs proclaimed, “Arby’s Roast Beef Sandwich is Delicious.” In 1975 the logo was reduced to a simple outline of a cowboy hat, and all the text was dropped except for “Arby’s.”
Company: Starbucks
Logo: A mermaid (from the neck up)
Meaning: When Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spices opened in Seattle in 1971, the founders named the company after a character from the novel Moby-Dick and wanted something associated with the sea for its logo. They found a 16th-century wood carving of a two-tailed mermaid, and hired graphic designer Terry Heckler to build on that. His design was a crowned, naked mermaid…still with the two tails. In 1987, after Starbucks was acquired by Howard Schultz and began a national expansion, the decision was made to lose the mermaid’s lower half (and her navel), cut out most of the tail (the rest is off to the sides and looks like arms now), and to focus on her smiling face.
The phrase “kid gloves” comes from boxing gloves made from goat, or “kid,” leather.
Logo: A square made up of four other squares, each a different color: red, green, yellow, and blue
Meaning: Microsoft’s main competitor, Apple, had an obvious logo, thanks to its name (it’s an apple). So Microsoft had to be a bit more clever. The company assigned a different color to the branding of each of its main four divisions, and those are represented in the corporate logo. The blue is for its flagship Windows operating system, the red is for its Office suite of productivity software, the green is for its Xbox video game sector, and the yellow is for its hardware line of Surface tablets.
Company: NBC
Logo: A peacock with rainbow-colored wings
Meaning: NBC, once a radio network and then a black-and-white television broadcaster, started airing color programs in 1954 and needed a logo that would strikingly announce that fact. Inspired by the phrase “proud as a peacock” (because they were proud of the color changeover), the marketing department chose the image of a peacock for their logo, and made its wings six different colors. Why six? That’s how many divisions NBC had at the time.
A RANDOM BIT OF FACTINESS
An absolute diarchy is a country ruled by two people. Example: Swaziland, which is ruled by the king and his mother.