IT公司Logo的前世今生(ZT)

tanzn78

You’ve seen these tech logos everywhere, but have you ever wonderedhow they came to be? Did you know that Apple’s original logo was IsaacNewton under an apple tree? Or that Nokia’s original logo was a fish?
Let’s take a look at the origin of tech companies’ logos and how they evolved over time:
Adobe Systems

Source: Adobe Press

In 1982, forty-something programmers John Warnock and CharlesGeschke quit their work at Xerox to start a software company. Theynamed it Adobe, after a creek that ran behind Warnock’s home. Theirfirst focus was to create PostScript, a programming language used in [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]desktop [color=#32527a ! important]publishing.
When Adobe was young, Warnock and Geschke did everything they couldto save money. They asked family and friends to help out: Geschke’s80-year-old father stained lumber for shelving, and Warnock’s wifeMarva designed Adobe’s first logo.
Apple Inc.

In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs ("the two Steves") designedand built a homemade computer, the Apple I. Because Wozniak was workingfor Hewlett Packard at the time, they offered it to HP first, but theywere turned down. The two Steves had to sell some of their prizedposessions (Wozniak sold his beloved programmable HP calculator andJobs sold his old Volkswagen bus) to finance the making of the Apple Imotherboards.
Later that year, Wozniak created the next generation machine: Apple][ prototype. They offered it to Commodore, and got turned down again.But things soon started to look up for Apple, and the company began togain customers with its [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]computers.
The first Apple logo was a complex picture of Isaac Newton sittingunder an apple tree. The logo was inscribed: "Newton … A Mind ForeverVoyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone." It was designed byRonald Wayne, who along with Wozniak and Jobs, actually founded AppleComputer. In 1976, after only working for two weeks at Apple, Waynerelinquished his stock (10% of the company) for a one-time payment of$800 because he thought Apple was too risky! (Had he kept it, Wayne’sstock would be worth billions!)
Jobs thought that the overly complex logo had something to do withthe slow sales of the Apple I, so he commissioned Rob Janoff of theRegis McKenna Agency to design a new one. Janoff came up with theiconic rainbow-striped Apple logo used from 1976 to 1999.
Rumor has it that the bite on the Apple logo was a nod to AlanTuring, the father of modern computer science who committed suicide byeating a cyanide-laced apple. Janoff, however, said in an interviewthat though he was mindful of the "byte/bite" pun (Apple’s slogan backthen: "Byte into an Apple"), he designed the logo as such to "preventthe apple from looking like a cherry tomato." (Source)
In 1998, supposedly at the insistence of Jobs, who had just returnedto the company, Apple replaced the rainbow logo ("the most expensivebloody logo ever designed" said Apple President Mike Scott) with amodern-looking, monochrome logo.
Canon

Source: Canon Origin and Evolution of the Logo

In 1930, Goro Yoshida and his brother-in-law Saburo Uchida createdPrecision Optical Instruments Laboratory in Japan. Four years later,they created their first camera, called the Kwanon. It was named after the Kwanon, Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. The logo included an image of Kwanon with 1,000 arms and flames.
Coolness of logo notwithstanding, the company registered thedifferently spelled word "Canon" as a trademark because it soundedsimilar to Kwanon while implying precision, a characteristic thecompany would like to be known and associated with.
Google
In 1996, Stanford University computer science graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]search [color=#32527a ! important]enginethat would later become Google. That search engine was called BackRub,named for its ability to analyze "back links" to determine relevance ofa particular website. Later, the two renamed their search engineGoogle, a play on the word Googol (meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros).

Google.com in 1998

Two years later, Larry and Sergey went to Internet portals (whodominated the web back then) but couldn’t get anyone interested intheir technology. In 1998, they started Google, Inc. in a friend’sgarage, and the rest is history.
Google’s first logo was created by Sergey Brin, after he taughthimself to use the free graphic software GIMP. Later, an exclamationmark mimicking the Yahoo! logo was added. In 1999, Stanford’sConsultant Art Professor Ruth Kedar designed the Google logo that the company uses today.

The very first Google Doodle: Burning Man Festival 1998

To mark holidays, birthdays of famous people and major events, Google uses specially drawn logos known as the Google Doodles.The very first Google Doodle was a reference to the Burning ManFestival in 1999. Larry and Sergey put a little stick figure on thehome page to let people know why no one was in the office in case thewebsite crashed! Now, Google Doodles are regularly drawn by DennisHwang.
IBM

Source: IBM Archives

In 1911, the International Time Recording Company (ITR, est. 1888) and the Computing Scale Company (CSC, est. 1891) merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR, see where [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]IBM gets its penchant for three letter acronym?). In 1924, the company adopted the name International Business Machines Corporationand a new modern-looking logo. It made employee time-keeping systems,weighing scales, meat slicers, and punched-card tabulators.
In the late 1940s, IBM began a difficult transition of punched-cardtabulating to computers, led by its CEO Thomas J. Watson. To signifythis radical change, in 1947, IBM changed its logo for the first timein over two decades: a simple typeface logo.
In 1956, with the leadership of the company being passed down toWatson’s son, Paul Rand changed IBM’s logo to have "a more solid,grounded and balanced appearance" and at the same time he made thechange subtle enough to communicate that there’s continuity in thepassing of the baton of leadership from father to son.
IBM logo’s last big change - which wasn’t all that big - was in1972, when Paul Rand replaced the solid letters with horizontal stripesto suggest "speed and dynamism."
LG Electronics

LG began its life as two companies: Lucky (or Lak Hui) ChemicalIndustrial (est. 1947), which made cosmetics and GoldStar (est. 1958),a radio manufacturing plant. Lucky Chemical became famous in Korea forcreating the Lucky Cream, with a container bearing the image of theHollywood starlet Deanna Durbin. GoldStar evolved from manufacturingonly radios to making all sorts of electronics and household appliances.
In 1995, Lucky Goldstar changed its name to LG Electronics (yes, a backronymapparently not). Actually, LG is a chaebol (a South Koreanconglomerate), so there’s a whole range of LG companies that alsochanged their names, such as LG Chemicals, LT Telecom, and even abaseball team called the LG Twins. These companies all adopted the"Life is Good" tagline you often see alongside its logo.
Interestingly, LG denies that their name now stands for Lucky Goldstar… or any other words. They’re just "LG."
Microsoft
Microsoft’s "groovy logo" source: Coding Horror
In 1975, Paul Allen (who then was working at Honeywell) and hisfriend Bill Gates (then a sophomore at Harvard University) saw a newAltair 8800 of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or MITS. Itwas the first mini [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]personal [color=#32527a ! important]computer available commercially.
Allen and Gates decided to port the computer language BASIC for thecomputer (they did this in 24 hours!), making it the first computerlanguage written for a personal computer. They approached MITS andended up licensing BASIC to the company. Shortly afterwards, Allen andGates named their partnership "Micro-soft" (within the year, theydropped the hyphen). In 1977, Microsoft became an official company withAllen and Gates first sharing the title general partners.
On to the logo history:
In 1982, Microsoft announced a new logo, complete with thedistinctive "O" that employees dubbed the "Blibbet." When the logo waschanged in 1987, Microsoft employee Larry Osterman launched a "Save the Blibbet" campaign but to no avail. Supposedly, way back when, [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]Microsoft cafeteria served "Blibbet Burger," a double cheeseburger with bacon.
In 1987, Scott Baker designed the current, so-called "Pac-Man Logo"for Microsoft. The new logo has a slash on the ‘O’ that made it looklike Pac-Man, hence the name. In 1994 Microsoft introduced a newtagline Where do you want to go today?, as part of a $100 million advertising campaign. Needless to say, it was widely mocked.
In 1996, perhaps tired of being the butt of jokes like "what kind oferror messages would you like today?", Microsoft dropped the slogan.Later, it tried on new taglines like "Making It Easier", "Start Something", "People Ready" and "Open Up Your Digital Life" before settling on the current "Your potential. Our passion."
Oh, one more thing: what was Microsoft’s original slogan? It was "Microsoft: What’s a microprocessor without it?"

… Microsoft’s very first advertising campaign"Microsoft: What’s a microprocessor without it?," which touted howMicrosoft’s line of programming languages could be used to create [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]softwarethat would take advantage of the early microprocessors. The firstadvertisement in the campaign appeared in a 1976 issue of a microchipjournal called Digital Design and featured a four panel black-and-whitecartoon titled "The Legend of Micro-Kid." The cartoon depicted a smallmicrochip character as a boxer who possessed speed and power butquickly tired out because he had no real training. The other character,a trainer complete with a derby on his head and big stogie hanging outof his mouth, related the story of how the Micro-Kid had a great futurebut needed a manager, such as himself, in order to succeed. (source: PC Today)

Motorola
Motorola, then Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, was started in 1928by Paul Galvin. In the 1930s, Galvin started manufacturing car radios,so he created the name ‘Motorola’ which was simply the combination ofthe word ‘motor’ and the then-popular suffix ‘ola.’ The companyswitched its name in 1947 to Motorola Inc. In the 1980s, the companystarted making cellular phones commercially.
The stylized "M" insignia (the company called it "emsignia") was designed in 1955. A company leader said that "the two aspiring triangle peaks arching into an abstracted ‘M’ typified the progressive leadership-minded [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]outlook of the company." (I’m serious, look up the logo-speak here: Motorola History)
Mozilla Firefox
In 2002, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross created an open-source web browser that ultimately became [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]Mozilla Firefox. At first, it was titled Phoenix, but this name ran into trademark issues and was changed to Firebird.Again, the replacement name ran into problem because of an existingsoftware. Third time’s the charm: the web browser was re-named MozillaFirefox.
In 2003, professional interface designer Steven Garrity, wrotethat the browser (and other software released by Mozilla) suffered frompoor branding. Soon afterwards, Mozilla invited him to develop a newvisual identity for Firefox, including the famous logo.
Update 2/7/08: I goofed on this one, guys: it was John Hicks of Hicksdesign that actually made the Firefox logo, designed from a concept from Daniel Burka and sketched by Stephen Desroches - Thanks Jacob Morse and Aaron Bassett!
Nokia

Source: about-nokia.com

In 1865, Knut Fredrik Idestam established a wood-pulp mill inTampere, south-western Finland. It took on the name Nokia after movingthe mill to the banks of the Nokianvirta river in the town of Nokia.The word "Nokia" in Finnish, by the way, means a dark, furry animal wenow call the Pine Marten weasel.
The modern company we know as the Nokia Corporation was actually amerger between Finnish Rubber Works (which also used a Nokia brand),the Nokia Wood Mill, and the Finnish Cable Works in 1967.
Before focusing on telecommunications and cell phones, Nokiaproduced paper products, bicycle and car tires, shoes, television,electricity generators, and so on.
Nortel

Source: Nortel History

In 1895, Bell Telephone Company of Canada spun off its business thatmade fire alarm, call boxes, and other non-telephone hardware into anew company called the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company Ltd.It began by manufacturing wind-up gramophones.
In 1976, Northern Electric changed its name to Northern Telecom Ltd.to better reflect its new focus on digital technology. Nineteen yearslater in 1995, it became Nortel Networks "reflecting its corporateevolution from telephoney manufacturing company to designer, builder,and integrator of diverse multiservice [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]networks."
Palm
[color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]PalmComputing Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, who also inventedthe Palm Pilot PDA. The company has gone through some rough patches inits history: its first PDA called Zoomer was a commercial flop. Next,it was bought out by U.S. Robotics who was promptly sued by Xerox forpatent infringement over its Graffiti handwriting recognitiontechnology.
Then it gets convoluted: U.S. Robotics was bought by 3Com, andHawkins, disgusted with office politics, left to create his own companyHandspring. Ironically, not long after he left, 3Com spun off Palm Incas a separate company. Palm Inc split into two, PalmSource (the OSside) and palmOne (the hardware part). palmOne then merged with Handspring and then bought PalmSource to coalesce back into … Palm, Inc.!
Got that? No? Never mind. All along this journey, they not onlychange names, but logos as well. Well, at least the graphics designersgot some money.
Xerox

Source: Xerox Historical Logos

Xerox Corporation can trace its lineage back almost 100 years ago tothe Haloid Company, which was founded in 1906 to manufacturephotographic paper and equipment.
In 1938, Chester Carlson invented a photocopying technique calledelectrophotography, which he later renamed xerography (Carlson wasfamous for his persistence: he experimented for 15 years and throughdebilitating back pain while going to law school and working hisregular job). Like many inventions ahead of its time, it wasn’t wellreceived at all. Carlson spent years trying to convince GeneralElectric, IBM, RCA, and other companies to invest in his invention butno one was interested.
Until, that is, he went to the Haloid company, who helped himdevelop the world’s first photocopier, the Haloid Xerox 914. The copierwere so successful that in 1961, Xerox dropped the Haloid from its name.
In 2004, fresh from a settlement with the Securities and ExchangeCommission for cooking the books, Xerox tried to re-invent itself(complete with a new logo). Four years later in 2008, it tried to getaway from the image that it’s only a copier company and adopted a new logo. The good news is people don’t think of copier when they see the new logo. The bad news is, they think of a beach ball.
Update 2/7/08: And yes, I missed the “Digital X” logo of Xerox. Check out Brand New [color=#32527a ! important][color=#32527a ! important]blog for the entire scoop.

熊猫羊

nokia最早的标志就像鱼贩子

tanzn78

canon的也很惨，和it没有任何关系。。。有人说象卖佛像的;)