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world famous company logos and their meaning
Graphic Design• Logo

World Famous Company Logos and Their Meaning

As big brands strive 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. In contrast, others might not strike any meaning or resemblance to you.

Interestingly, there is a small number of various logos that are world-famous and are easily recognizable even when we are not clients of the brand.

The strengths of these brands are unmatched, and consumers recognize these brands in a split second.

Those 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 into the conversation and explain why they adore a particular logo design and how it was created.

logo sketching

Some logos are just logos, but some have a meaning behind them. When this meaning is revealed, it says a lot about the amount of imagination in their creation.

Perhaps it is important to analyze some of the meaning attached to these logos so that they 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 those of us who might be involved in branding in one way or another can learn from the best and be inspired to be more creative in the process.

1. Adidas

This brand has for a long time been synonymous with a logo comprising three diagonal lines that appear to scale from the shortest to the longest.

This logo was not the original Adidas logo. It 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. Still, this time a meaning would be ascribed to it, presenting Adidas as an athletic brand.

men in adidas warming up

The concept for a logo represented the climb to a mountain top. The three stripes represent the ascent of a mountain.

This means that Adidas is a brand associated with the struggle that athletes go through in achieving their optimum best and equating this to the effort required to reach a steep mountain peak.

2. Cisco

The company Cisco is synonymous with providing solutions in the telecommunication industry. It has grown to become a leader in this industry.

The symbol above the words Cisco represents electromagnetic waves, basically serving as a statement of the company’s industry.

At the same time, the logo is in the shape of a suspension bridge.

cisco logo

The bridge depicted in the logo is the famous golden gate bridge that links San Francisco city to Marin County, which symbolizes the 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 the last five letters of San Francisco’s name. The founders went a long way to pay homage to their home place and remind us where they started their global company.

3. Amazon

Amazon is the top brand when it comes to eCommerce. From their beginnings of selling books online, they have grown to provide almost anything that you can imagine and deliver to your doorstep.

The logo consists of letters with a yellow, slightly curved line that looks like a smile.

amazon logo on a mobile screen

Indeed, the yellow line is a smile that represents the satisfaction that the online platform users 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 means 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 are a lot of note-taking apps that are available out there. Still, after a brief look at the app downloads on the app store, you will be surprised that the Evernote app has over 100 million installs.

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 were trying to convey.

evernote logo

Elephants have always been a sharp memory, remembering important routes to drinking holes and even remembering events.

Therefore Evernote as an app helps you with the same memory level when taking your important notes.

On the other hand, the folded ear looks like the folded corner of a page, symbolizing the nature that most people have always done to note a specific 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 this is still one of the most appealing logos I’ve come across after all these years in the graphics industry.

You can easily see how the logo is in the shape of a peacock that has colorful feathers. The peacock’s upper body is popping up from the negative space between these perfect rainbow color feathers.

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 subtly.

nbc logo

This logo clearly has several messages for the observer. To begin with, we must understand the background of the company.

The company was established in the 50s when color television was introduced to the market. As a marketing initiative, the colorful logo was created, which symbolizes the new era of television. You can watch your favorite program in full-color mode.

The peacock is associated with how much pride or prestige the consumer should feel as a viewer of NBC. At the same time, 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 search results.

The logo is known as the ‘swoosh,’ representing motion and precision. If you look at the logo, it is a perfection of curves and straight lines almost in perfect alignment.

nike shoes laying on the flor

Nike adopted this logo as a response to Adidas. The main aim of Nike’s logo design was to beat Adidas in its simplistic logo design. However, it still had to be aesthetically appealed.

Today, it is impossible to imagine that it was not appreciated when the designer presented the concept design to the company. There were plans to change what is now known as the world’s famous brand design.

Luckily enough, the owners decided to go along with it, and the rest is history.

brandbrandingcompanylogo
On February 4, 2019 • By Mika
About Mika

I’m a graphic designer with 12 years of experience in this creative industry. I’ve launched DesignyUp because I would like to share the know-how I gained on my design journey.

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    About Me

    I’m a graphic designer with 12 years of experience in this creative industry. I’ve launched DesignyUp because I would like to share the know-how I gained on my design journey.

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