The 20th Century was an incredibly important time in the history of the logo. While logos and things like them had been used for hundreds (arguably thousands) of years beforehand, and the first official logo had been trademarked in 1876 by the Bass brewery company, it was in the 20th Century that logos really evolved into what we know them as today.
Many of the best logos of all time sprang from the mid 20th Century and the rise of modernism. A logo became something more than an eye-catching picture that could sit next to a well-known name; it became a substitute for the name itself, thanks to forward-thinking designers like Paul Rand, Thomas Geismar and Saul Bass. If you’d told someone in 1900 that one day, a simple design of two yellow arches would be recognised by billions of people as the emblem of a restaurant, they’d have thought you were talking nonsense. But, as we all know, indeed it became so.
