Many famous logos really do hide a meaning: Cisco’s bars echo the Golden Gate Bridge, Amazon’s arrow runs from A to Z, Toblerone’s mountain hides a bear, and NBC’s six feathers once stood for six divisions of the network. Others are popular stories that the companies never confirmed. The Instagram illustrator Logo Chest takes thirteen well-known marks and scribbles hand-drawn notes around them, pointing out the hidden shapes and the stories people tell about them.
The notes are fun, but they mix three different things: what the designers or companies have said, what most people see in the shape, and claims that started as marketing folklore. Below, each annotated logo is paired with what reliable sources actually say, so you can tell which “secrets” are documented design history and which are best taken with a smile. The drawings are grouped by industry, from tech companies to food brands to a television network.
Technology brands
Cisco
Cisco’s name is a shortening of San Francisco, the city where Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner founded the company in December 1984. The row of vertical bars is a stylised outline of the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is the documented meaning. The drawing also adds “electromagnet”, a reading of the bars as signal waves that sounds plausible for a networking company but is not part of the official story.
VAIO
This is one of the best-documented logo meanings in tech. Sony designer Teiyu Goto shaped the “VA” as a smooth analog wave and the “IO” as the binary digits 1 and 0, so the word itself shows analog turning into digital. The name originally stood for Video Audio Input Output; Sony sold the VAIO PC business to Japan Industrial Partners in 2014.
Nvidia
Nvidia was founded on 5 April 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The name grew out of “NV”, short for “next version”, and it echoes the Latin invidia, meaning envy, a link both Huang and Priem have claimed credit for. The annotation’s “all-seeing eye” and “green for growth” readings are interpretations of the swirling green emblem rather than documented company statements.
Apple
The Apple logo was designed by Rob Janoff (not “Rob Yanov”, as the old caption had it) in 1977, in time for the launch of the Apple II. Janoff says he worked from real apples and their cross-sections, and the first version was striped in rainbow colours for about twenty years. The note that “bite” sounds like “byte” is a much-loved pun, but Janoff’s own account of the design does not present it as the reason for the bite.
LG
LG takes its name from the 1983 merger of Lucky and GoldStar; the company became simply LG in 1995, when this style of emblem arrived. Most people notice that the L and G inside the red circle form a winking face, as the drawing points out. LG’s own description says the symbol stands for the world, the future, youth, humanity and technology, with the letters placed inside the circle to show people at the centre of the business.
Food and drink
Toblerone
Toblerone was created in Bern, Switzerland, in 1908; the name blends the Tobler family name with torrone, Italian for nougat, and the bar does contain honey and almond nougat. The classic mountain was the Matterhorn, and a bear, the symbol of Bern, is hidden in its outline. Because production moved partly abroad, Swiss labelling rules led the brand in 2023 to replace the Matterhorn with a more generic peak.
Starbucks
Starbucks opened in Seattle in 1971, and its emblem is a twin-tailed siren that the company has said was based on a 16th-century Norse woodcut. The original brown version showed the full figure; she was cropped and turned green in 1987, simplified again in 1992, and freed of the surrounding wordmark in 2011. Seattle designer Terry Heckler worked on the brand’s early naming and identity; the idea of sirens “luring” coffee lovers is the company’s storytelling rather than an official design brief.
McDonald’s
The Golden Arches began as architecture: in 1952–53 Stanley Meston designed tall yellow arches for the McDonald brothers’ restaurant buildings. The arches were turned into the “M” logo in the early 1960s, and the current version dates from 1968. The annotation’s claim about breasts comes from marketing consultant Louis Cheskin, who argued the arches had Freudian appeal; it is a famous opinion, not a documented design intention.
Shopping, travel, sport and sound
Airbnb
Airbnb started in 2008 as AirBed & Breakfast and introduced this symbol, nicknamed the Bélo, in July 2014. London agency DesignStudio built it around the idea of “belong anywhere”, combining a person with raised arms, a location pin and an upside-down heart into a shape that also reads as the letter A. The drawing labels the four parts as people, places, love and Airbnb, which matches how the design was presented at launch.
Amazon
The yellow arrow was created by the agency Turner Duckworth after Jeff Bezos asked for a new identity as Amazon grew from books into everything else. The agency describes turning the old frown into a simple arrow shaped like a smile that runs from the “a” to the “z”. Both annotations, happy customers and “everything from A to Z”, are therefore part of the documented intent.
Adidas
Adidas bought the three-stripe mark from the Finnish brand Karhu in 1952, reportedly for a modest sum plus two bottles of whisky, and Adi Dassler liked to call his business “the three stripes company”. The slanted three-bar logo shown here was introduced in 1997, replacing the 1972 trefoil, and many people see a mountain or a rising challenge in it. Stripes on early shoes are often said to have helped hold the sides of the shoe together; that is a common explanation rather than one confirmed in the company’s official history.
Beats
The Beats by Dr. Dre logo is a lowercase “b” inside a red circle. The drawing shows the classic reading: the circle as a head and the “b” as a pair of headphones seen from the side. It is a neat visual match for a headphone company, though it is best treated as a popular interpretation rather than a quoted design brief.
Broadcasting
NBC
NBC’s peacock first appeared on 22 May 1956 to promote programmes broadcast in colour, at a time when NBC’s owner RCA was selling colour TV sets. The original bird had eleven feathers; the six-feather version shown here was designed by Steff Geissbühler of Chermayeff & Geismar and unveiled in 1986. Each feather’s colour stood for one of NBC’s six divisions at the time, including News, Sports and Entertainment, so both annotations are accurate.
How to tell a real logo meaning from a myth
Good logos are built to be read in more than one way, so viewers will always find faces, arrows and hidden animals in them. When a meaning is genuine, it usually shows up in the designer’s own portfolio, the agency’s case study or the company’s brand guidelines. Toblerone’s bear, Amazon’s A-to-Z arrow, VAIO’s analog-to-digital lettering and NBC’s six divisions all pass that test.
Stories that rely on a single unnamed founder, a convenient pun or a claim about the subconscious, such as the McDonald’s breasts theory or the Apple “byte” bite, deserve more caution. They make great trivia, but they are opinions or jokes that grew in the retelling. Logo Chest’s sketches are a playful way into the subject, and checking each claim against the people who made the logo turns them into genuine design history.
Sources: annotated drawings by Logo Chest; Rob Janoff: The Apple Logo Story; Turner Duckworth: Amazon; Dezeen: Airbnb rebrand by DesignStudio; LG Corp: CI elements; Wikipedia articles on Cisco, VAIO, Nvidia, LG Corporation, Toblerone, Starbucks, Golden Arches, Adidas and NBC logos.
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