A company’s brand is a succinct but comprehensive embodiment of everything the company stands for. The best logos are recognizable, memorable and let you know what the company is about with just a glance. But even the biggest companies in the world have to change with the times and grow as their brand grows. While rebranding is an expensive (and sometimes risky) undertaking, these companies have thrown caution to the wind and changed up their logos – and most of them have done it over and over.

Pepsi

(images via: PSFK and InstantShift)

Officially trademarked in 1903, Pepsi-Cola has gone through many changes over the years. Though each individual change wasn’t drastic, the evolution has led to a logo with no trace of the original. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the first few iterations looked surprisingly like the logo of their main competitor, Coca-Cola. The latest of these changes took approximately 5 months of research and cost in the neighborhood of $100 million (including costs of changing old logos and marketing literature).

(image via: Blow at Life)

It didn’t take long after the introduction of the new curvy logo for Lawrence Yang to notice that it looked a bit like…well, a guy who enjoyed a bit too much Pepsi. His hilarious (and free!) revamp of the new logo has been floating around on the Internet and reminding people of a bloated fat guy since 2009.

Starbucks

(images via: Starbucks)

Like Nike and Pepsi, Starbucks’ logo recently evolved away from including the company name. The famous woodblock mermaid illustration now stands on her own sans the signature Starbucks font.

(image via: Felipe Torres)

Also like Pepsi, the 2011 logo change inspired some further logo alteration. This illustrated “future” of Starbucks’ logo takes the company’s trend to its logical conclusion: a close-up so extreme you can no longer tell what in the world it is supposed to be.

Nike

(image via: Logo Design)

Nike’s famous ‘Swoosh’ logo is universally recognized. Created in 1971 by a graphic design student at Portland State University (who was paid just $35 for her work), the logo was first used with the brand name appearing behind it. Though the original logos were never retired (you can still purchase ‘vintage’ gear with the original logos), a little over a decade after its inception the company opted to drop the brand name in favor of the ‘Solo Swoosh’.

Wal-Mart

(image via: InstantShift)

Before it became the giant retailer that it is today, Wal-Mart was a single discount store in Rogers, Arkansas. As the company grew by leaps and bounds, the logo underwent only minor changes. The “Discount City” logo introduced in 1968 was used on employee smocks but never on store signage; when you take that logo out of the timeline it seems that the retailer hasn’t made many drastic changes over the years. The most noticeable alteration was in 2008 when the star was moved from the middle of the name to the end, leaving the official Wal-Mart logo without a separator (like a hyphen or a star) for the first time in over 40 years. Interestingly, the current logo looks quite a bit like the company’s original logo.

Apple

(image via: InstantShift)

Today, Apple has one of the most recognizable logos in the world, but the company’s first logo was a complicated mess featuring Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, apple dangling above his head. The too-complex logo was scrapped after less than a year in favor of the iconic rainbow apple with a bite missing. When Steve Jobs returned to the helm of the company in 1997, the old rainbow was ditched in favor of a sleek, stylish monochrome apple which now features prominently on every product the company sells.

Canon

(image via: Neatorama)

The Japanese imaging products company actually started life as Kwanon. The name was taken from the Buddhist bodhisattva Guan Yin, who is known in Japan as Kannon. When the company expanded in 1935, they adopted a name that they thought would appeal to a wider audience. Since “canon” had a similar pronunciation and positive associations, the word became the company’s new name. With the new name came a new, simple logo: the company’s name in a typeface which at that time did not exist in North America or Europe. Since then the logo has undergone a few refinements, but no major overhauls.

Microsoft

(images via: LogoTalks)

Most technology companies are particularly concerned with keeping up with the times, which makes perfect sense. Microsoft, however, does not seem to care as much about keeping their image interesting as some other tech outfits. Microsoft’s original logo (from 1975) was a disco-type font which didn’t last long. The second logo (used from 1982-1987) featured a distinctive “O” which was known within Microsoft as a “blibbet.” In 1987 the current “Pac-Man” logo was adopted (so called because of the slashed “O”) and since then various tag lines have accompanied the logo.

Xerox

(image via: InstantShift)

You have to hand it to Xerox: they have come back from so many challenges – from market changes to accounting scandals – to keep on doing business more than a century after the company was founded. These days it seems like they spend more time trying to keep their company name from becoming a common verb than actually doing business, but they bravely soldier on. Their most recent logo reflects the company’s desire to prove that they are more than just copiers.

IBM

(image via: Neatorama)

Name changes, mergers and changing times amounted to a century of logo updates from IBM. However, the most recent logo has remained in place for nearly forty years now while the machines sold by IBM have changed dramatically.

Volkswagen

(image via: InstantShift)

Volkswagen, one of the world’s most beloved car brands, actually started out life as a pet project of Adolf Hitler. After WWII, the British took control of the company and removed the graphical Nazi elements from the logo. The company’s long, fascinating history has led to surprisingly few logo redesigns, with the company choosing instead to stick with the familiar stacked letters inside a circle.

A well-designed logo is timeless, simple, memorable, versatile and appropriate. But then there are the hideous, the bizarre, the unreadable and the offensive (whether due to unintended double entendres or Comic Sans). The things that make a logo truly awful aren’t easy to define, but you know a bad one when you see it – clip art, raster graphics, unrelated imagery and poor choices in typeface. Except in the hands of a truly exceptional designer, these 10 mistakes will cripple any corporate branding strategy.

Uninspired Fonts

(images via: good people bad fonts)

For the love of good design, please don’t ever use Papyrus, Curlz MT or – heaven forbid – Comic Sans in a logo. Ever. These fonts have earned the vitriol of designers around the world with good reason; while they may have their place in personal communication between schoolteachers, they don’t belong in graphic design of any kind, let alone the most visible piece of branding your company has. Overused and cutesy fonts, especially of the widely available ‘free’ variety, do absolutely nothing to add to a brand’s identity. They scream ‘amateur designer’ and make companies look unprofessional.

Stock Art

(image via: thetreedoctor)

On a similar note, stock clip art that can be acquired for free on the internet or on very cheap CD-ROMs can’t possibly set your company apart. It’s not just that the designs themselves aren’t usually great quality; if potential customers note the same little sketch of a house on your company letterhead that they saw earlier on an informational poster in their dentist’s office, they’re not going to take you seriously.

Photoshop Filters & Effects

(image via: the club doctor, fierce photography)

Outer glow, inner glow, drop shadow, highlights, gradients, bevels – all of these effects have their place. Used sparingly by a good designer – as in the latest Apple logo – they add a bit of visual interest. Piled on, they make logos messy and harder to read. Technically, Photoshop and other image editing programs shouldn’t really be involved in logo design at all (more on that later), but things like ‘lens flare’ just don’t translate well in what is supposed to be bold, graphic imagery.

Inappropriate Imagery

(images via: checkpoint, von brandis)

Graphics that are vague or totally disconnected from what a company is all about can kill a logo’s memorability.  What, for example, does a dolphin have to do with a security firm? How is an abstract art piece that sort of almost barely resembles a computer going to remind people of your software company? The graphics, color and mood associated with a logo should have some association what the company does – i.e., don’t use primary colors and a goofy typeface for a legal firm. But don’t take that too literally – a car company doesn’t need to have a car shape in its logo, for instance.

Really, Really Inappropriate Imagery

(images via: bad logo project)

Not everyone looks at images like those above and immediately sees phallic symbols, sexual innuendo or four-letter words. But in the interest of not becoming a tired Beavis and Butthead joke, it might be best to take a good look at the graphics in your logo to ensure that they don’t resemble anything offensive or inappropriate.

Fuzzy Graphics

(images via: vector-conversions)

Being good at fine art does not make one good at logo design; an image from, say, a watercolor painting or pencil sketch will more than likely look muddy, complicated and unmemorable when used in a logo. The same typically goes for photography. Does that mean effective logos all have to be spare, bold and modern? No. But it certainly helps.

The bigger mistake, in this case, is using raster rather than vector images. Raster images are made up of tiny pixels, and get extremely fuzzy when blown up. Vector images, on the other hand, are scalable, so they look good at any size. Programs that don’t deal with vector images – like Photoshop – shouldn’t be used to create logos.

Reliance on Color for Effect

(images via: conjurelimited)

One of the best tests for logo design is to put it in black and white. If it’s still crisp and readable, even on a small scale or printed in reverse (i.e. a white design on a black background), it’s a good logo – if not, try again. For optimal results, many designers recommend creating a logo in grayscale first, then translating it to color.

The Corporate Swoosh

(images via: capital one, kraft, blow at life)

After over a century of ineffective, constantly changing logos, Pepsi has finally resorted to the corporate swoosh – the bland, meaningless decorative flourish that says “I give up”. The corporate swoosh is safe yet completely disconnected from brand identity, except in the case of Nike, who truly made it theirs. In Pepsi’s case, the uninspired swoosh-in-a-circle even takes on a rather unfortunate connotation (as illustrated by a graphic designer). A swoosh doesn’t make it good design. It’s just lazy.

Unnecessary Complexity

(images via: seattle pi, salute to soda, desoto, village sports)

For every corporate swoosh there’s a logo that goes way too far in the other direction, with way too much going on. Not only do overly complex logos tend to look terrible on signage and other places that logos are commonly used, but they are simply too muddy to make much of an impact. And when they’re reproduced on a small scale, they become illegible. The original Starbucks logo, the new Sunkist logo, and far too many sports-related logos fall into this category.

Unreadable Jumbles

(images via: london 2012)

If reading your logo requires squinting and head scratching, it needs some work. Take, for example, the controversial London 2012 logo for the Olympic Games. It takes a moment or two to realize that those big blocky shapes are supposed to say ‘2012’, and there’s absolutely nothing clever about them despite a bunch of hyperbole from the designers about nuances in what the logo means.  Luckily, the Olympics don’t need too much help getting publicity, but if this logo were for a company, they’d be in trouble.