Cleverly Embedded Smart Ideas in Popular Logo Designs

Recently on our sister blog, we discussed the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. The conclusion was that there is an idea behind this hidden arrow. It provides a momentarily joy of discovering something to the viewer. Secondly, it smartly embeds FedEx’s message into the logo design. This trend is not just limited to FedEx logo. In this post we will look at some other examples where an idea is cleverly embedded into logo.

This is the logo design of Sun Microsystems. In this logo you see a diamond type shape on your left. This is not a diamond, it is an ambigram designed by professor Vaughan Pratt of Stanford University. An ambigram is a typographical design that spells out one or more words from different perspectives and point of views. In this example this ambigram spells out word sun from all corners.

This is the logo of world’s most popular online shopping destination amazon.com, and you can notice an arrow below the word amazon. Surprisingly many of Amazon customers don’t know what this arrow means. To most of them it looks like a smile. Well it is not a smile; if you notice, the arrow begins from “A” and ends at “Z” making a clever a-to-z sign. This iconography suggests that Amazon promises to provide you all the items that could possibly be sold online.

This is the logo design of North West Airlines which is now merged with Delta Airlines. The typography in this logo cleverly uses the Word “W” to also make it look like “N”. When the viewer is concentrating on “N” they notice the triangle on their left which actually represents the aerodynamic shape of modern jetliners. You can see a similar combination of triangles representing aerodynamic shapes of modern planes in the logo Delta Airline

This is Nike’s world famous swoosh logo. We have written a detailed post about the history and mythology behind Nike’s Logo. To summarize it here, Nike is the title of an ancient Greek Goddess. She was the goddess of victory and fame, and bestowed wellness and fortune on those who were great athletes or warriors. Now if one looks at how Nike promotes itself as a brand, one would notice that they do the same to the athletes, they endorse them by signing them up for huge amount of money and ask them to wear their swoosh sign in athletic competitions.

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