Logo Color History: From One-Ink Marks to Flat Design and Back

Every logo in On Brand is a snapshot of its moment. The colors companies choose have always followed the technology that carried them: what a printer could afford, what a television could show, what a 1990s monitor could display, what looks right at the size of a phone icon. Here is that story in brief, with the redesigns that marked each turn.

The first registered trademark in the United Kingdom was a single red shape. Britain's Trade Marks Registration Act came into force on 1 January 1876, and the first mark entered was Bass's red triangle, for beer (Bass Brewery).

For most of the century that followed, color cost money. Every ink on a printed label, poster or package meant another plate, and often another pass through the press, and newspapers printed in black. A mark had to work in one color, usually black, before anyone paid for a second. Color lived where it could be painted: shop signs, enamel plates, delivery vehicles. Many of the colors that became most tied to a company, like the brown UPS says it put on its vehicles in 1919, started as paint rather than print.

After the Second World War, big companies began to treat their look as a system. The designer Paul Rand drew IBM's logo in 1956 and its striped version in 1972, and the UPS shield with a bow-tied parcel in 1961. These marks were built to be reproduced anywhere, so their shapes did the work and their colors were few.

Then color became something a company could write down. In 1963 Lawrence Herbert introduced the Pantone Matching System, a numbered library of inks so that a designer in one city and a printer in another could mean exactly the same color (Pantone). A brand color stopped being "a sort of blue" and became a number in a contract, which is also what made it something a company could later defend in court.

Television was black and white until color sets arrived, and networks had to persuade people that color was worth buying. In 1956 NBC introduced a peacock, eleven feathers in different colors, to herald its color broadcasts. In 1986 the design firm Chermayeff & Geismar redrew it with six. The bird is still NBC's mark: a logo whose whole point was to show off color.

Apple used color the same way. Its rainbow apple, designed by Rob Janoff, arrived in 1977, the stripes meant to make a computer company feel friendly. It lasted until 1999, when Apple dropped the rainbow for single-color versions of the same shape (Apple logo).

Early computer screens could show only a few colors at once. Many displays of the 1990s managed 256, and designers learned the 216 "web-safe" colors that looked the same on most of them: six levels each of red, green and blue (Web colors). The GIF images that carried most web logos held at most 256 colors too. Flat, bold colors survived this world. Subtle gradients broke into bands.

As screens improved in the 2000s, logos went shiny. Reflections, bevels, drop shadows and glassy gradients spread across websites and software, a look later lumped together as "Web 2.0". Even Apple's logo picked up the mood: Apple used a glass-themed version of its apple from 2007 to 2013.

The reaction came in the early 2010s, and screens drove it again. Logos now had to work as a 16-pixel browser icon, a phone app tile and a stadium sign, and fine gloss turned to mush at small sizes. The look that won was flat design: solid shapes, solid colors, no shine.

The landmarks came quickly. Starbucks dropped the ring of words round its logo in 2011, leaving the green siren on its own. Microsoft put four flat colored squares beside a new, plainer wordmark in 2012, and Windows 8 went flat the same year. Apple's iOS 7 stripped the shine from the iPhone in 2013. Google moved to a plain, geometric sans serif in 2015, keeping its blue, red, yellow and green letters. Mastercard simplified its overlapping red and yellow circles in 2016, and in 2019 began using the circles without the name.

Flat did not last unchallenged. In 2016 Instagram replaced its brown, retro camera icon with a simple outline over a bright gradient running from purple through pink and orange to yellow. Plenty of people hated it at first, and the gradient has stayed ever since. Color gradients spread again, this time smooth and saturated rather than glossy, because modern screens could finally show them cleanly.

The latest swing is toward fewer colors, and often toward black. Car makers flattened their badges for screens: Volkswagen unveiled a flat logo in 2019, and BMW a flat version with a see-through outer ring for its marketing in 2020. Fashion houses moved to plain black capitals, as Burberry did in 2018. Twitter's blue bird gave way to a black-and-white X in 2023, and Pepsi's 2023 redesign set a black wordmark across its globe, with an electric blue beside it. Burger King went the other way in 2021, returning to a warm, rounded logo much like the one it used from 1969 to 1999.

The pattern under all of this is steady. When a medium limits color, logos get simpler. When it frees color up, logos use it, until it is everywhere and simplicity starts to look distinctive again.

If you grew up with a brand, the version in your head may be one the company retired years ago: a glossier blue, an older red, the rainbow apple. Memory blends old and new, which is one reason we misremember brand colors so consistently. On Brand uses each company's official logo as it is drawn for screens, so a brand that redesigned in recent years can catch out even its longtime customers. A few companies have gone further and made a color their legal property, and the colors companies own tells those stories.

Next time you play, notice which logos are a single color and which carry four or five. The single-color ones are often the hardest to get exactly right, because there is nothing else in the logo to compare with.