Behind the Branding: 45 Surprising Facts about Famous Logos

The “n” in 7-ELEVEn is lowercase because the President’s wife thought the all-caps was too harsh and, with a lowercase letter, the logo looked more graceful.

2. The old Pirate Bay’s logo features the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” logo, a slogan from the 1980s which implied that recording music on blank tapes is illegal.

3. The bull on Elmer's glue logo is the husband of Elsie, the cow on the Borden Milk logo.

4. VLC Media Player uses a traffic cone as its logo because the students who created the program had a traffic cone collection.

5. The Domino's Pizza logo has 3 dots because that's how many stores there were in 1969. They planned to add a new dot for every store that opened, but that was quickly scrapped as the franchise grew rapidly.

When the Nike Swoosh logo was created in 1971, the designer billed $35 for it. In 1983, Paul Knight sent her a golden Swoosh diamond ring, with an undisclosed amount of Nike stock as thanks.

7. The Whataburger logo was trademarked before the Wonder Woman logo.

8. The United Nations logo is centered around the North Pole to avoid any one country/continent being more prominent.

9. The Ferrari logo originally decorated the plane of Count Francesco Baracca, Italy’s top WWI fighter ace. After Baracca was shot down, his mother gave the badge to Enzo Ferrari, saying “Ferrari, put my son’s prancing horse on your cars. It will bring you good luck.”

10. The Lion's roar from the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer logo is actually made from tiger vocalizations, as "lions don't make that kind of ferocious noise and the logo needed to be ferocious and majestic."

Toyota's logo depicts a thread going through the eye of a needle. It a call back to when Toyota used to make weaving machines.

12. The 20th Century Fox logo at the start of "Die Hard" looks stretched as an assistant editor accidentally used a non-anamorphic version of the logo which was stretched when projected as widescreen. The producer liked the look of it and the same version was used for the sequel.

13. One of the main reasons WWF founder Sir Peter Scott choose a panda as the organisation’s logo was to minimize printing costs (needing just black and white).

14. The Mexican free-tailed bat is featured as Bacardi's logo because it pollinates sugar cane and protects it from insects.

15. The Xbox logo went with the color green because the original designer only had that one color marker left after others stole the rest at Microsoft.

The Eskimo logo on Alaskan Airlines planes is Chester Seveck, a reindeer herder who for years greeted tourists getting off the plane at Kotzebue, Alaska.

17. The Cadillac logo came from the crest of the founder of Detroit, Le Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

18. McDonald’s considered changing its logo in 1960, but American psychologist Louis Cheskin argued for the company to keep the logo because, in Freudian terms, the logo symbolized a “mother’s nourishing breasts.”

19. The Cisco logo is the Golden Gate bridge and "Cisco" is short for "San Francisco"

20. There is a cryptocurrency named Dogecoin with the face of a Shiba Inu as it’s logo. It was made as joke in 2013 but is now worth of over $4 billion in market value (as of Jan 2021).

In 1992, a graphics artist named Jennifer Joseph was hired as the model for the Columbia Pictures logo which is still in use today.

22. The Danish King Harald Blatand ate so many blueberries that his teeth stained blue. "Bluetooth" is named after him because of his ability to unite warring Scandinavian factions, just as Bluetooth unites wireless devices. The Bluetooth logo is also a combination of the King Harald’s runic initials.

23. Drogheda United FC, a small Irish football team, has a logo based on, and in gratitude to, the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans secretly smuggled food into Drogheda during the Great Famine.

24. The Anarchist logo is the mixture of "A" for anarkhia "without ruler/authority" and "O" for "order and organization". Which is a reference to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's quote "as man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy."

25. The meaning behind Apple logo isn’t actually meant to pay tribute to Alan Turing. The size of the bite showed that the shape was an apple, not a cherry or any vaguely round fruit. However, when Stephen Fry once asked Steve Jobs if the logo was based on Turing, he replied, “God, we wish it were.”