As big brands strives to achieve brand presence in today’s world you can never walk too far without coming across a logo splashed in big letters on billboards as you walk by.
Some of these logos might have significance to you personally as a consumer while others might not strike any meaning or resemblance to you.
What is interesting is the fact that there is a small number of various logos which are world famous and are easily recognizable even when we are not clients of the brand.
The strengths of these brands
Those who are in marketing will tell you how a specific logo is associated with the brand and why a logo has a certain appeal to the general public.
Graphic designers will also cut in conversation and try to explain why they adore a particular logo design and how was it created.
Some logos are just logos but some have a meaning behind them and when this meaning is revealed it says a lot about the amount of imagination that went into their creation.
Perhaps it is important to analyze some of the meaning attached to these logos so that it can inspire those of us who might be involved in branding in one way or another.
Perhaps it is important to analyze some of the meanings attached to these logos so it can inspire those of us who might be involved in branding in one way or another by learning from the best and inspire us to be more creative in the process.
1. Adidas
This brand has for a long time been synonymous with a logo comprising three slanted lines that appear to scale from the shortest to the longest.
This logo was not the original Adidas logo and was a redesign in the 90s from the previous logo which didn’t bear any meaning whatsoever.
The aim was to maintain the previous theme but this time a meaning would be ascribed to it, one which would present Adidas as an athletic brand.
The concept for a logo was the representation of the climb to a mountain top. The three stripes represent the ascent of a mountain.
This means that Adidas is a brand that is associated with the struggle that athletes go through in achieving their optimum best and equating this to the effort required in reaching the peak of a steep mountain.
2. Cisco
The company Cisco is synonymous with providing solutions in the telecommunication industry and has grown to become a leader in this industry.
The symbol above the words Cisco is a representation of electromagnetic waves basically serving as a statement of the industry that the company is associated with.
At the same
The bridge depicted in the logo is famous golden gate bridge that links San Francisco city to Marin County, which symbolises home and headquarters of the Cisco company.
It’s a simple symbolism but shows that the founders were keen to remind us of the humble beginnings of a company that conquered the world of telecommunications.
The symbolism, however, doesn’t stop there. World Cisco is formed from last five letters of San Francisco name. The founders went a long way to pay homage to their home place and to remind us where they started their global company.
3. Amazon
Amazon is the top brand when it comes to
The logo consists of the letters with a yellow, slightly curved line that seems to look like a smile.
Indeed the yellow line is a smile that represents the satisfaction that the users of the online platform will experience when they purchase from Amazon (a testament to customer satisfaction).
The line also slants from the letter A to the letter Z which has the meaning of service delivery that the company provides. It means you should be able to get everything you can think of on the website.
4. Evernote
There
It would seem that the app has captured the hearts of many and might actually be one of the best ones, so they must be doing something right.
The logo of this app is an elephant with a slightly folded ear. The first time I saw the logo I instantly knew what they was trying to convey.
Elephants have always been known to have sharp memory, remembering important routes to drinking holes and even remembering events.
Therefore Evernote as an app helps you with the same level of memory when you take your important notes.
The folded ear on the other hand looks like the folded corner of a page symbolizing the nature that most people have always done to note a certain page when reading a book.
This is quite clever and doesn’t take a lot of imagination to get the message across.
5. NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation)
Because I’m a big fan of negative logotypes, I must say that after all these years in the graphics industry, this is still one of the most appealing logos I’ve come across.
You can easily see how the logo is in the shape of a peacock which has colorful feathers. The
You can also notice how the beauty of this logo is revealed in the perfect symmetry achieved by the feather features and how the peacock’s body breaks away from this symmetry in a subtle manner.
This logo clearly has several messages to the observer. To begin with, we must understand the background of the company.
The company was established in the 50s at the same time that color television was introduced to the market. As a marketing initiative, the colorful logo was created which symbolizes the new era of television where you can watch your favorite program in
The peacock is associated with how much pride or prestige that the consumer should feel as a viewer of NBC, while the number of tail feathers used in a logo represents the different divisions in the network.
6. Nike
As a top brand in the athletics industry, Nike has one of the most noticeable logos you can ever come across. If you simply Google ‘logo’ you will most likely come across the Nike symbol as one of the top searches results.
The logo is known as the ‘swoosh’ and it basically represents motion and precision. If you look at the logo, it is a perfection of curves and straight lines that are almost in perfect alignment.
Nike adopted this logo as a response to Adidas. The main aim of Nike logo design was to beat the Adidas in their simplistic logo design but it still had to be
Today it is impossible to imagine that when the designer presented the concept design to the company, it was not appreciated and there were plans to change this what is now known as the worlds famous brand design.
Luckily enough the owners decided to go along with it and the rest is history.
