from abstract marks to literal representations of things brands are named after there are many different types of symbol logos some are simple some are complex some are full of color some are black some live within placeholders some roam free and a lot are the first letter of a brand yet lately it seems more and more brands are striving to be summed up in a mark without the need for well words from car companies to clothing brands the need to be instantly identifiable across physical and digital experiences seems to be pushing A lot of companies to fit their entire brand Essence into a rounded Square so which brands have actually done it let's find out these are 10 brands whose logos are just symbols now number 10 Adidas in 2021 Adidas released a new logo that looked very similar to the one it had used for decades since 1991 the athletic wear brand has used its famous three strip symbol with a word Mark beneath it ahead of the 2022 Qatar football World Cup the German company tweaked its logo removing the word mark it had featured in some form or another since 1950 the symbol only logo began popping up on social media leading up to the 2022 World Cup then gradually rolled out on its website physical stores and clothes while the old logo with the word Mark will continue to appear on retro items and re-releases the company is relying on the three stripes to represent the brand solo going forward number nine Nike after changing its name from Blue Ribbon Sports Nike introduced a new logo in 1971 the Nike Swoosh although he only paid graphic design student Caroline Davidson $35 for it Nike founder Phil Knight didn't love the swoosh at first and because the brand was still new the logo had to be accompanied by word Mark at launch by 1978 the swoosh had not only grown on night it had become closely identified with the Nike brand and became a more prominent part of the logo it was converted from a stroke to being filled in black and having the new Nike word Mark in all caps Futura work around it in 1985 the main brand color changed from black and white to red and white then 10 years later the word Mark was removed moved all together by this time the swoosh had become truly iconic and could stand on its own to represent the company as it does to this day while the Futura word Mark and even the cursive lowercase serif version appear on packaging and shoes here or there it's usually for particular lines and retro re-releases but on store signage apps and official corporate coms the swoosh is the logo no word Mark needed number eight MasterCard in 2019 MasterCard updated its logo the famous intersecting red and yellow circles were there but the word Mark was not after a redesign in 2016 led by Design agency pentagram the brand did 2 years worth of audience research they found that 80% of people spontaneously recognized the intersecting circles logo this Insight made MasterCard comfortable enough with removing the word Mark and relying solely on its iconic symbol the intersecting circles logo had been around since 1966 when MasterCard was still called Master charge since then it was updated with the new name got a '90s font and aesthetic update where the intersection element was converted into half tone style then in 2016 it was simplified to look like two filled circles overlapping with an updated quieter all lowercase word Mark pentagram partner Michael Bay brute who worked on the project said the new 2019 logo SE Master Card enter an elite cardr of brands that are represented not by name but by symbol an apple a target a swoosh while that may be the ambition the logos for apple and Target work as symbol because the brand names and the logos are one and the same they're the names of things but it does make sense to compare it to the Nike Swoosh which on its own is an abstract image but has been imbued with meaning as the market has been educated on the brand and products it represents the real reason MasterCard is stripping its brand down to its Bare Essentials is because we're moving to a cardless future more and more Brands like MasterCard and Visa are simply small icons we see in the virtual checkout seeing the intersecting red and yellow circles or the blue and yellow stripes signals that our payments will be secure this is why Visa's branding is moving in a similar direction to MasterCards with Ling its logo down to just its stripes at checkout we'll have to wait for mastercard's next round of audience research to find out if it worked number seven McDonald's McDonald's brand is so ubiquitous that you'd be forgiven for not realizing how much it's changed over the years since debuting in 1961 the Golden Archers have taken a few different forms and undergone many design treatments inspired by some of the company's early restaurants which used two golden arches and diagonal roofs to attract customers the shapes were soon styled into an m to represent the company's name but through the 7 s and into the 1990s the Golden Archers were often accompanied by the McDonald's word Mark cutting through it usually housed in a warm red tile in the '90s and the early 2000s the Golden Archers made appearances unbundled from the word Mark with shadows or 3D rendering applied to them but generally they were still locked behind the word Mark for official use in 2019 Turner Duckworth were brought in to declutter the brand and make it what CEO Steve Easterbrook called a modern Progressive burer company in this new identity The Archers have been liberated standing on their own and officially turning McDonald's into an icon brand The Archers can now be used more freely with cropping and altering perspective allowed the icon has also influenced the color palette previously red was the dominant color with a highlight of yellow but now it's very much the other way around the archers have also inspired the company's custom font Speedy which incorporates the symbol's shapes and curves into its letters while they feature sparingly the use of The Archers is more playful they don't have to appear everywhere yet when they do there's a power and also a lightness to them look at the end of this animation and notice the single stroke of one of the archers on the drink you don't even need to see the whole thing to know what it is or this animation where the arch is morph to form the shape beneath the bridge there's a subtle Delight to that it makes sense for a global brand that's mainly selling consistency of product and experience they have one of the most identifiable logos in the world they don't need a word Mark that may have to be reworked in other markets the big Golden Archers say enough which is why increasingly it's the main thing you'll see outside their restaurants number six Starbucks from 1971 to 2011 coffee brand Starbucks used a logo with a similar structure an illustration of a siren shown within a circle with the words Starbucks and coffee bordering it while the siren had been altered and gradually cropped in more and more the General logo structure had remained more or less the same until 2011 when the words Starbucks and coffee were removed the change marked the Brand's 40th anniversary and the simplified design took the elements that most people interpreted from the previous logo the siren and the green and refined the logo down to only those elements it solved a major problem Starbucks which wanted to sell more than just coffee didn't want to confuse consumers Starbucks actually sells tea food and other products at its stores and in supermarkets among other places yet when people saw the words Starbucks coffee on the previous logo which technically was the company's name they assumed the product had caffeine or indeed coffee in it for such a complex symbol it speaks to Starbucks's Savvy and frankly the company's aggressiveness at open stores in the early 2000s that the logo is so well known but when you consider that most people after a while interpret the color and shape of a logo more than its content you can see how they've succeeded here in fact a great test for iconic Brands is in simple illustrations and animations like these where details like eyes and noses aren't present just the Bare Essentials what are the Bare Essentials of a logo it seems that Starbucks can successfully indicate its logo by placing a green circle on a takeaway coffee cup that's how powerful their consistent use of a similar shade of green and a circle in their logo has been Starbucks like McDonald's is a ubiquitous brand that spent years educating the market on its logo Vibe and product being a global brand that transcends the barriers of language and indeed categories like coffeee is vital to its growth and its ability to be identified just through its symbol is Testament to the brand Equity it's built number five Volkswagen in 2020 Volkswagen introduced a new version of its iconic VW logo thinner and more minimal it signaled the Brand's electrification and should apparently be more legible across different screens what the new logo also signaled was the end of having its name accompany it an iconic symbol Volkswagen had for a long time alternated using it alone or with a word Mark in different applications around in some variation since the late 1930s the VW logo is truly iconic and whenever I see it it reminds me of vw's history of quirky ads of which its font was a a big part but that soft playful image came to a head when in 2015 the US apaa found that the company had used software in its diesel engines to cheat emissions tests that same year it just happened to launch a new font it previously used a modified version of Futura but it was replaced by a slightly more clinical font that Volkswagen owned while it has been used here or there to accompany the logo in most cases it's much less prominent leaving it to the new VW logo to rep the brand Alone number four Formula 1 in 2017 after 23 years of using the old one Formula 1 unveiled a new logo the previous logo introduced in 1994 was designed by Carter and Wong and existed in a time when F1 was more about specs stats and speed but by 2017 the sports connection with its fan base was missing some passion that year it was acquired by Liberty Media who went to work trying to broaden the Brand's Global appeal designed by Richard Turley who was a year into his role as executive creative director of content and design at Weeden and Kennedy the new identity was built to be more fan focused and to make that goal the heart soul and future of the sport research told them that fans were disengaged and that the engineering side had overtaken The Human Side turly told creative review that F1 had a logo but they didn't really have an identity initially Turley had worked to distill the F1 brand through a graphic device that moved away from the letter and the numeral he thought they couldn't do an F or a one any better than Carter and Wong had but when they landed on the ultimate design it had presence the result was this logo made up of three simple shapes forming an f and a one the Tilt forward evokes speed and the shapes evoke the bends of a racetrack it's a flexible design and was launched with a new suite of type Faces by French designer Mark R the relaunch was followed in 2019 by the first season of the Netflix document series drive to survive the series and rebranding has ushered in a new era for F1 re-energizing its fan base and expanding it significantly by becoming a multiplatform experience number three Twitter although it's basically dead now Twitter went through several logos before settling on its iconic blue bird initially part of the audio and video video directory Odio Twitter's first unofficial logos were boring weird featured different spelling and in one case a different name but in 2006 the company launched its first official logo designed by Linda Gavin and using a rounded sand serif style the logo was the name Twitter the iconic blue was there with a white outline around the letters creating a bubble light effect the Twitter bird did exist around this time but it wasn't an official part of the logo because it was actually bought from IO designed by Simon Oxley Larry Bird as it was known named after the basketball player was only featured as an icon on the website but based on that bird Twitter updated its logo in 2010 to feature a slightly more streamlined word Mark and a new design of the bird co-founder bis Stone designed a bird featuring a white eye and a sharp tail and Philip paszo and Douglas Bowman then refined this design and turned it into this then in 2012 the company decided that the Twitter bird was recognizable enough to stand on its own graphic designer Martin grasser sketched thousands of birds whittling them down to just 24 and presenting them to Jack dorsy who was CEO at the time d gy intuitively gravitated to this one you can feel that rounded effect even if you're not actively looking for it and that makes sense because this version is made up of 15 circles there are no straight lines here the bird is also looking upwards representing hope freedom and development while the layers of circles are meant to represent connecting people and ideas the logo quickly became beloved in the design and Tech communities and it was used until the Brand's death when Elon Musk turned it into X in 2023 number two Shell Shell has been around since the early 1900s when two Dutch petroleum companies with shells for their logos merged inspiring the name the first iteration of the logo was based on the design of a muscle shell then 4 years later it was changed to more of a fan-shaped scallop shell in 1930 the logo was redesigned again to remove clutter and make it more minimalistic increasing the use of Whit space in 1948 the iconic yellow and red colors were introduced along with a word mark saying shell in all caps in 1955 they simplified this design Tiding up The Strokes and making the word Mark red instead of white to be more breedable in 1961 the background was changed to Red to make the yellow logo and name stand out even more then in 1971 the rectangle background was ditched the word Mark was removed from the center and placed beneath the shape in a new font and case and lines that looked like sunbeams were added connecting from the border the font was changed briefly in 1995 then in 1999 the word Mark was removed all together while it's obviously ubiquitous brand that most people associate with function more than passion the creativity behind it name and image is admirable for more than a century this petroleum company has used very conceptual branding a creative risk that more companies can afford to take number one apple for a lot of people's lifetimes Apple has been represented by a symbol with no need for a word Mark after launching with a strange over Illustrated logo Apple introduced its icon rainbow logo designed by Rob janof in 1977 it accompanied the launch of its first personal computer the Apple 2 in April of that year featuring a 2d apple with a bite taken out of it it's pretty much the exact silhouette we know today urban legend has it that it was meant to represent the bite of a poison apple that famous computer scientist Alan Turing took to kill himself but according to Steve Jobs that's it's not true however he did tell Walter isacon the author of his biography that he wished he'd thought of that instead the bite was used to clarify that it was an apple people were looking at not a cherry the bite also allowed the a of the accompanying word Mark to nest in the symbol it's so interesting to try and imagine a world where the Apple symbol could be mistaken for anything else it's also amusing to see such a minimalist streamlined logo by today's standards next to such a loud font the apple of today would never and from 1984 on it never has that year the word Mark was removed and the colors and shape of the logo were tweaked slightly this version of the logo was used until 1998 in that time Steve drops left returned and started repositioning apple as a luxury brand andand during that period the rainbow logo was stripped in favor of solid black and the shape was also slimmed down slightly and while it's undergone different treatments over the years it remains more or less the same up to today while it seems pre-ordained that consumers naturally understand Apple's logo to be apples it's good to know that even they had to educate the market on exactly what their symbol was much in the same way it took consumers years years to identify Nike's abstract Mark and Starbucks's Illustrated siren with their respective Brands and products it can take just as long when your logo is a literal representation of a thing and while having a logo that's identifiable without words is great it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a sound business and when brands are able to use design creatively and consistently to communicate their true essence they usually survive [Music]