The Nintendo Logo: From Playing Cards to the Red Pill
Nintendo was making playing cards in Kyoto for almost eighty years before it made a video game. Its logo, a word inside a red rounded outline, is simple enough to sit on all of it.
A journal of iconic marks
Where logos tell stories
The history, design choices and meaning behind the world’s most famous logos, plus ideas for designing your own.
Latest stories
The Porsche Logo: A Crest Sketched for America
The first Porsche sports cars had no badge, only the name in metal letters on the bonnet. The crest arrived a few years later, because an importer in New York asked for one.
The Lacoste Logo: How a Tennis Nickname Became a Crocodile
The green crocodile on a Lacoste shirt started as a joke about a suitcase. It ended up as one of the first logos anyone wore on the outside of their clothes.
More stories
The Audi Logo: Four Rings and the Companies Behind Them
The four rings on an Audi do not stand for Audi. They stand for four car makers in Saxony that merged in 1932, and only one of them was called Audi.
The Puma Logo: The Leaping Cat and the Formstrip
Puma began with a quarrel between two brothers in a small Bavarian town. What it built afterwards is a lesson in how to look fast: a cat in mid-leap and a stripe that sweeps along the side of a shoe.
The Volkswagen Logo: The Story Behind the VW Badge
The Volkswagen badge is a V stacked on a W inside a circle, and it has been that since the 1930s. It has been cleaned, chromed and flattened, but it has never been replaced.
The Adidas Logo: How Three Stripes Became a Global Brand
Adidas started with stripes that had a job. Adi Dassler stitched leather bands along the sides of his running shoes to hold the foot steady, and only later did anyone think of them as a logo.
The PlayStation Logo: History, Design and Influence
The PlayStation logo was drawn in 1994 by Manabu Sakamoto, for a company that made televisions and Walkmans and had never sold a games console. His answer was two letters, a P and an S, arranged so they seem to stand in three-dimensional space, which was exactly what the console was promising to do with games.
The Versace Logo: Medusa, Gold and Greek Keys
Most luxury houses sign their goods with initials. Versace chose the face of a monster from Greek myth, the Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone. It is one of the strangest logos in fashion and one of the most effective.
The Jeep Logo: How a Plain Wordmark Became an Icon
The Jeep logo has no animal, no crest and no shield. It is four letters in a sturdy sans-serif, and it has carried one of the best-known names in the car business since the vehicle came out of World War II.
Ready to design your own icon?
Borrow the lessons of the greats: simplicity, a memorable shape, a colour that owns a feeling. Then make your mark in a minute with our free logo maker.
Create a logo