8 Everyday Logos and Designs Created by Famous Artists

In 1977, with New York City broke and struggling with a grim reputation, graphic designer Milton Glaser sketched an idea for a tourism campaign on the back of an envelope in the back of a taxi. A capital I, a fat red heart, and two letters: N and Y. That was it.

Glaser expected the campaign to last a few months and never charged the state a penny for it. Instead it became one of the most imitated logos on Earth, plastered across mugs, caps, and knockoffs in every language. He kept the original pencil sketch, and it now lives in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The daisy-shaped logo on a Chupa Chups lollipop was drawn in 1969 by none other than Salvador Dalí, the mustachioed surrealist of melting clocks fame. The story goes that he sketched it over lunch, working out the design on a sheet of newspaper in about an hour.

His one clever contribution wasn’t just the flower shape — it was the idea of putting the logo on top of the wrapper rather than the side, so it always stayed visible no matter how the sweet was set down. That bright yellow burst has barely changed in more than fifty years.

Before 1933, the map of the London Underground was a tangle of wiggling lines laid over real geography — accurate, and almost impossible to read. Harry Beck, an engineering draughtsman who was working on it in his spare time, had a radical thought: nobody underground cares where things really are, only how the stops connect.

So he threw out geography entirely, straightened every line to run horizontal, vertical, or at a tidy 45-degree angle, and spaced the stations evenly like a circuit diagram. The transport bosses were skeptical and paid him a token sum. His design became the template for transit maps the world over.

If you’ve ever squinted at the striped IBM logo or the lowercase circle of the old ABC television mark, you’ve been looking at the work of Paul Rand — arguably the most influential corporate designer America ever produced. From the 1950s onward he built the visual identities of IBM, ABC, UPS, Westinghouse, and, yes, Enron.

Rand’s gift was making the complicated look inevitable. He argued that a great logo should be simple enough to draw from memory, and his marks have aged so gracefully that most of them are still in use, or barely tweaked, decades later.

The lolling red tongue and lips of the Rolling Stones is one of the most recognizable band logos ever made — and it was designed in 1970 by John Pasche, then a student at the Royal College of Art. Mick Jagger had asked the college for a designer, and Pasche took the job for the modest sum of £50, with a bonus later.

It’s often assumed the tongue is a caricature of Jagger’s own mouth, but Pasche has said the real inspiration was the fierce, tongue-out imagery of the Hindu goddess Kali, mixed with a simple nod to rebellion. The Victoria and Albert Museum bought his original artwork in 2008.

When the World Wildlife Fund launched in 1961, its founders wanted an animal that was appealing, endangered, and — usefully for a young organization watching its budget — printable in black and white. A giant panda named Chi-Chi, then a star at London Zoo, fit perfectly.

The naturalist and painter Sir Peter Scott, one of the fund’s founders, is usually credited with the final panda design, though he worked from preliminary sketches by fellow conservationist Gerald Watterson. Scott reportedly liked that a panda needed no color printing to be instantly recognizable — a practical touch behind one of the world’s best-loved logos.

The circle with three lines inside it is everywhere — but it started as a very specific protest badge. In 1958 the British designer Gerald Holtom created it for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for a march against nuclear weapons from London to the Aldermaston research site.

The lines are the semaphore flag positions for the letters N and D — nuclear disarmament — enclosed in a circle. Holtom deliberately never trademarked it, wanting it free for anyone to use, and it quickly slipped its original purpose to become the universal sign for peace itself.

Here’s the one that always gets a reaction. The Nike swoosh — maybe the most valuable logo on the planet — was designed in 1971 by Carolyn Davidson, a graphic-design student at Portland State University. Company co-founder Phil Knight, then teaching a class there, hired her for freelance work. She billed him for 17.5 hours at $2 an hour: $35.

Knight’s famously lukewarm reaction was, “I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.” It grew. Years later, once Nike was a giant, the company brought Davidson back and gifted her stock and a diamond swoosh ring — a belated thank-you for one of the great bargains in design history.