You may have two forms of intellectual property protection for your logo design. Trademark to prevent competitors and others from using it to cause confusion in the marketplace and Copyright to prevent most other unwanted copying.

Today almost all major nations follow the Berne Copyright Convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not. So we should always assume that other people’s works are copyrighted and may not be copied.

But if you want to have a legal safety for your logo, it must reach a requisite level of creativity. Many logos, however, do not. Since Copyright can’t protect a name, colors or the design of the logo, most simple logos simply do not have the required level of creativity to be considered copyrightable.

A “qualifying work” is a: 

– literary work
– a musical composition
– a film, a software program
– a painting
– or any of many other expressions of creative ideas

– but they protect only the expression itself and not the idea.

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I bet you will learn a lot from their mistakes, and a long logo evolution of improvements until they’ve reached the final design. Or at least it will be very entertaining and interesting for you.

Don’t you get curious about how other great companies have achieved their recognition? This post is for you to see how great worldwide brands changed their logos by the time. Uncountless logos are made every year for corporations, products, brands, services, agencies and others. However, people only recognize a few of them without their names and this should be our goal too. 

Of course each case has a history behind and your are going to tell yours. So take a look at the logo evolution from 10 companies below and try to identify why it changed and tell us what you think on the comments.

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As their own website explains, Pantone is a color Matching System (PMS for short) that uses a unique code scheme. This “key” will help you find easily a particular Pantone Color number or name without misunderstandings.

The history started in the 60s, when Pantone was a printing company in Carlstadt, New Jersey, with a specialty in color charts for the cosmetic, fashion, and medical industries. Lawrence Herbert joined the company in 1956 and noticed how difficult it was to identify exact colors from names. So, in 1962 he bought Pantone and launched the first PMS guide in 1963 with only 10 colors to try to minimize the errors and number of variables happening in the printing process. Creating an objective, numeric language means that any printer anywhere in the world can accurately produce this color. Continue Reading

The term logo is a shortened form of ‘logogram’ which means a sign or character that represents a word or phrase. So, hieroglyphs and pictograms are therefore some of the earliest historical examples of logos.

The history of logo design begins with the roots of human expression. In fact, the fundamental power of symbols remains the most important element of logo design. A logo has meaning because it draws on centuries of signs and symbols and visual language. Humans have used logos and graphic iconography for thousands of years. The Ancient Egyptians, for example, first used their hieroglyphics to brand and identify their belongings.

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