Making it in the land of opportunity has often required outlandish signage and bold graphical articulation. Here we have selected a series of American objects that bear instantly recognisable design statements that have stood the test of time. Is there something distinctly American in their combination of commerce and culture, or is successful branding simply a case of mass consumption meets volume marketing?
All the examples featured here have become acknowledged showstoppers in their respective genres, adorning everything from fashion and fast food to architectural wonders and waistbands, mashing up high art and commerce in wondrous combinations along the way. These are their creative stories.
14 American logos that made contemporary graphic design history
I ❤️ NY
By its sheer ubiquity, I Love NY may be the world's most appropriated logo. Fifty years after it was introduced, it has become an all-purpose shorthand for allegiance and affection for anything, anywhere. Designed by Milton Glaser in 1976, it originally served as the graphic punchline to an ad campaign that helped rescue NYC from the brink of bankruptcy. Desperate to arrest its ballooning fiscal deficit, city officials funded the campaign to lure tourists back to the Big Apple. Doodling on the taxi ride from his home to the office, as he often did, Glaser drew a red heart paired with the letters ‘I' and ‘NY' rendered in American Typewriter, a slab serif with a 1970s flair, and worked with longtime studio assistant George Leavitt to slightly tweak it. Decades before the proliferation of emojis, some worried that the rebus-like construction would confuse people. Nevertheless, the city officials accepted the proposal, and soon made it the logo for the entire state. Copycats emerged almost immediately, but the state secured copyright, earning it tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees each year.
The logo's widespread popularity became Glaser's calling card but also a kind of creative prison, with almost every article about him inevitably circling back to it. The 2009 National Medal of Arts honoree's many other achievements include co-founding New York magazine, designing restaurants, and producing hundreds of posters, album covers and book jackets, as well as logos for Brooklyn Brewery, DC Comics, and Italian gelato maker Sammontana. Glaser, who passed away on his 91st birthday in 2020, never lost sight of the New York logo's original purpose as a civic symbol. In the aftermath of 9/11, he appended it with the words ‘More Than Ever', added a burn mark to a corner of the heart, and gave the grieving city a ready-made banner. The same poster re-emerged in shop windows and on food carts during the pandemic. In 2023, the city felt compelled to rebrand Glaser's logo, but the flood of complaints confirmed one thing: a ferocious affection for the original. Text by Anne Quito
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New York Mets
Selected by a public competition, the design for the New York Mets logo, unveiled in 1961, was the work of illustrator Ray Gotto. Though the baseball team would play in Queens (as rivals New York Yankees were based in the Bronx), Gotto sensed that an emblem that could unite the entire city was needed, so he drew a symbolic New York skyline using a medley of landmarks from various boroughs, including the Woolworth Building, the Empire State Building and the UN HQ, while a suspension bridge anchors the composition. Originally rendered in black and pink, the palette was later revised to blue, orange and white, colours that also echo New York City's flag. In the decades since, the Mets have cycled through owners, managers, stadiums and uniforms, but Gotto's logo remains a fiercely guarded emblem. Text by Anne Quito
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Tiffany & Co
HardWear yellow gold micro link ring, £2,500, by Tiffany & Co, tiffany.com
The Tiffany box sits on the illustrious list of famous objects that money can't buy. ‘Charles Lewis Tiffany has one thing in stock that you cannot buy for any price; he will only give it to you. And that is one of his boxes,' read a 1906 article in the New York Sun, and the rule still stands. The box's distinctive shade of turquoise has been trademarked since 1998 and an official Pantone colour since 2001 (dubbed 1837 Blue to reflect the company's founding year). Having remained largely unchanged, in 2005, Pentagram partner Paula Scher was asked to give the brand a discreet refresh. The new identity focused on the blue box, and the shade was rolled out to include advertising, bags and the inside of the boxes. The new logo was hand-drawn to resemble a hot-stamped, letterpress typeface, signalling a combination of luxury and craft. Text by Rosa Bertoli
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Chateau Marmont
Chateau Marmont occupies a mythic place in Hollywood folklore: a decadent sanctuary overlooking the Sunset Strip that has been attracting artists, movie stars and musicians for almost a century. It opened originally as an apartment building in 1929, modelled loosely on the medieval Château d'Amboise in the Loire Valley, before becoming a hotel in the 1930s. When André Balazs took over in 1990, he wanted to retain as much of its historic ambience as possible, working with creative agency Pandiscio Green on a visual identity. The hotel's storied past is reflected in its timeless logo, which uses the medieval-style lettering of the Libra font (created by Dutch typographer Sjoerd Hendrik de Roos in 1938) – its hand-drawn look is perfectly in keeping with the property's French gothic, intentionally shabby aesthetic. Text by Kevin EG Perry
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IBM
Designed in 1956, at a time when International Business Machines was still using vacuum tubes in its vast room-filling computers, the IBM logo was the work of Paul Rand, who had honed his skills as a magazine art director before turning to corporate identity. The simple three-letter device gave the industrial monolith a coherence across a dizzying range and scale of products, capable of coping with everything from a business card to a business park entrance. Rand would modify it in 1960 and again in 1972 to create the familiar striped version.
Distinctive, bold and graphic, it was an appropriately serious signifier for the world’s largest computer maker, and is still in use today. In many respects, IBM was a pioneering design collaborator, also choosing to work with the likes of Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Eliot Noyes, George Nelson, Denys Lasdun and Eero Saarinen.
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Snoopy
Created by Charles M Schulz, comic strip Peanuts followed the exploits of Charlie Brown and his dog Snoopy. Snoopy was the result of Schulz's observation of the relationship between children and dogs, noting the high levels of tolerance a dog has for children's games. Schulz originally drew him as an ordinary-looking black and white beagle who walked on all fours, but he later simplified him, with Snoopy developing long ears and expressive dots for eyes. The streamlined design made Snoopy both instantly recognisable and adaptable, meaning he could move easily from newspaper strips and toys to products, ad campaigns and fashion collaborations. He has appeared in collections by the likes of Chanel, Gucci and Lacoste, and on everything from sneakers to watches, including Timex, who, in 1965, became one of the first watch brands to obtain licences for the use of the Peanuts characters. Text by Hannah Silver
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Campbell's
The Campbell's soup can was already one of the most recognisable pieces of packaging in America by the time Andy Warhol turned his attention to it in the 1960s. Adept at blurring the boundaries between commercial design and fine art, Warhol was unique in recognising the power packaging had to transcend the mundane, becoming a cultural symbol in its own right. By reproducing the soup can almost exactly, and without comment, Warhol asked viewers to consider why such an everyday item held so much significance, and whether it came from his reproduction or the effectiveness of the original package design. The work became a defining image of the Pop Art movement, presenting an entirely new vision of what contemporary art could be, as well as influencing generations of graphic designers and advertisers to come. Text by Hannah Silver
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Hollywood
The most famous sign in the world transcended every conceivable aspiration of its originators, developers SH Woodruff and Tracy E Shoults, who, in 1923, were part of a consortium looking to promote their new real estate venture Hollywoodland. The job went to Thomas Fisk Goff of the Crescent Sign Company, who set out the name in 50ft-high blocky capital letters across the hillside above Beachwood Canyon. Visible for miles, and illuminated for its first decade, the sign was initially popular but soon started to decay. Demolition was considered at the point when it simply read ‘ollywoodland', but, in 1949, buoyed by local support, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in, reinstating the ‘H' and dropping the ‘land'. And there it has remained ever since, even threatening to outlast the industry it celebrates. Text by Jonathan Bell
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MoMA
Ivan Chermayeff 's logotype for MoMA first surfaced in 1964, taking a starkly typographic approach with its effective and appropriately modern use of Franklin Gothic No.2. MoMA Gothic, a custom typeface designed by Matthew Carter, was introduced in 2004 and, five years later, Pentagram was appointed to create guidelines for the use of MoMA Gothic across the museum's entire visual output, from signage to posters and publications. The agency worked in parallel with Julia Hoffmann, MoMA's creative director for graphics and advertising, to devise ways it could be cropped, coloured and paired with content, reducing the logo down to an abstracted set of letters. Chermayeff 's original solution proved so enduring that it remains the foundation stone of the museum's visual identity more than 60 years after it was devised. Text by Jonathan Bell
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McDonald's
The first McDonald's restaurant to showcase the golden arches in physical form opened in 1953 in Phoenix, Arizona, designed by Stanley Clark Meston. Working with co-founder Richard McDonald, who suggested the idea of the arches, Meston's assistant Charles Fish rendered the forms not as simple curves but as structural parabolas. However, it was the company's head of engineering and design Jim Schindler who would translate the physical incarnations into the extended ‘M' logo, with the signature yellow and red colours providing eye-catching contrast. Today's McDonald's franchises are flat-packed structures that can be erected in 24 hours, not neon-lit Googie wonders that send midcentury buffs salivating. But on packaging, the golden arches have been served up to billions in the decades that followed their creation. Text by Jonathan Bell
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Nike Swoosh
‘I don't love it, but it will grow on me.' This was the reaction of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, when he first saw what would become the Nike ‘swoosh', conceived by Carolyn Davidson to adorn the fledgling sports label's footwear. (Then a design student at Portland State University, she was paid $35 for the commission, though was later rewarded with shares in the company and a diamond ring bearing the motif.) Originally designed as a take on the stripe that featured on other sneakers of the time, its elongated silhouette was conceived by Davidson to express a feeling of speed and agility – as if it was being viewed dashing past. And dash it did. In 1972, one year after Davidson submitted the design, two of the top American finishers at the Boston Marathon crossed the line wearing Nike shoes marked with the swoosh. Text by Jack Moss
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Levi's
Levi's began in San Francisco in the mid-1850s during the California gold rush when Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss identified a need for hard-wearing work clothing for miners. In 1873, he invented the ‘waist overall' (crafted from indigo selvedge denim with metal rivets, they are what we now know as the ‘original blue jean') and the year is stamped on the leather patch that appears on every pair of Levi's jeans. Known as the ‘two-horse patch' in reference to its protagonists (two horses pulling a pair of jeans in opposite directions without destroying them), the pictorial design was used because of high illiteracy levels in the American West; the idea was that people could go into stores and ask for ‘those pants with the two horses'. The brand's logo has evolved, but the two-horse patch has endured, a symbol of what remains the US' definitive fashion export. Text by Jack Moss
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Calvin Klein
Calvin Klein's sans serif logo, first introduced by its namesake designer in 1968, is an exercise in simplicity and directness – a reflection of Klein's approach to fashion, which would flourish in the 1990s. And, while the logo has appeared on everything from fragrance bottles to T-shirts, it will be forever associated with the elastic waistband of the brand's underwear – a stroke of marketing genius that saw people hitch down their jeans to reveal their brand allegiance. Their ubiquity was achieved through Klein's evocative underwear ads photographed by the likes of Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. Memorable campaign stars have included Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus, Mark Wahlberg, Kate Moss, Freddie Ljungberg, Naomi Campbell, Justin Bieber, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Jeremy Allen White and Bad Bunny. Text by Jack Moss
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Nirvana
In 1989, Nirvana's first record label, Sub Pop, was in need of artwork for the band's debut album Bleach. It commissioned designer Lisa Orth, who at the time was working at The Rocket, a Seattle music paper that was one of the driving forces behind the nascent grunge scene. The story goes that she simply asked her colleague Grant Alden to use whatever font had just been used on their typesetting machine. It happened to be Onyx, a blocky serif display font that gelled so well with the reversed black-and-white live image on the cover that it became the band's logo going forwards, appearing on records, T-shirts, patches and the like. The font deviates slightly from that used in the band's infamous ‘Satan Worshippin' Mother Fucker' T-shirts, which have flipped ‘N's and appear to be a little more Bodoni-adjacent. Text by Jonathan Bell
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