logo design history

In the early 1950’s in Salt Lake City, USA, Pete Harman opened a fast food restaurant. In 1952 Harman met Sanders in Chicago. At the time, Sanders, a versatile and experienced cook, was working out of a successful restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky. During his time there, Harman visited this restaurant on a daily basis and sampled Sander’s cooked chicken coated in a special mixture of herbs and spices. He loved the chicken and its coating so much that he proposed to Sanders that they work together to build the cooked chicken business. Once customers had tasted this special coating, then the business grew. It became known as “Kentucky Fried Chicken” and as a result of its popularity, franchise stores began to sprout up all over the country. The “Kentucky Fried Chicken” brand was changed to the abbreviation KFC from the early 1990s so as to move away from the fatty connotation of the word fried. The logo itself as shown to the left depicts the creator of KFC – Sanders himself. KFC has kept a remarkably consistent visual identity – maintaining the defining elements of Colonel Sanders’ image while adapting to the visual shifts of the fast food industry. The new KFC brand will be followed by a 65,000 square foot logo in the Area 51 dessert – that can be seen from space – code-named the “Face from Space” and consisting of 14,000 white, 6,000 red, 12,000 eggshell, 28,000 black and 5,000 beige tiles. The new KFC logo was designed by San Francisco-based Tesser. The drawing has dynamism, depth and dimension, without resorting to shading, showing that a well-conceived set of shapes can communicate more directly and boldly than any amount of shading will ever do. The new brand conveys the efforts that KFC has made over the last couple of years to animate the brand with energetic and fresh ads and position it to compete against Crispin-led Burger King and McDonald’s. This is a corporate logo design that works well across web, TV, print and environmental contexts and most of all, is appropriate for its audience, market and visual context.

free logo download eps

Established by businessman Henry Strong and inventor George Eastman, Eastman Kodak in an American multinational public company known for producing and supplying a wide array of photographic equipment and materials. Eastman preferred the letter K for it seemed an incisive, strong sort of letter. In 1960, the company introduced the corner curl. The graphic “K” element was not introduced until the 1970’s along with the box. The year 1987 saw a further update of the logo as a more contemporary type font replaced the old one. Eastman Kodak Co. has recently introduced a new corporate symbol created to help the company contrive a new image as an up-to-date, 21st century groundbreaker. Kodak was forced to reinvent itself and that led to an enhancement of the corporate image. So we can see how Kodak breaks out of the box busting out a new corporate identity to replace their 50-year old current one. The new logo features a distinctive “a” and a rounded type font. Today’s new, symplified Kodak logo keeps the company’s distinctive yellow and red colours but dispenses with the box that has comprised the word “Kodak” for the past 70 years.