This week’s Friday Feature is going to take a look at logos that feature animals. As you no doubt already know, creatures of all shapes and sizes turn up in all sorts of logos, and not just those for animal charities as you might expect. For example:
This logo is actually an unused design proposal but it’s still rather impressive. The brief instructed the designer to create a logo that was bold, fierce and strong while also demonstrating beauty and elegance. A chimera is a mythical beast from Greek mythology with the body of a lion with an extra head – a goat’s, to be exact – and a snake for a tail, and as you can see the designer took a very literal approach. Perhaps the fact that goats aren’t normally associated with elegance put them off?
This property company’s logo is a great example of beautiful simplicity. The dog’s distinctive silhouette is completed by the cut-out effect created by the white house outline underneath it, made unmistakeable by the inclusion of the small door between its legs.
The Firefox logo is widely recognised, it depicting the eponymous fox curling around a blue globe that serves to represent the World Wide Web. A number of humorous spoof versions of his logo exist, with them usually showing the Firefox fox attacking the Internet Explorer logo in some shape or form. Interestingly, the name ‘Firefox’ is actually derived from a nickname for the red panda, while the browser was originally called Firebird and later Phoenix before assuming the moniker we know it as today.
Bacardi Limited is the largest privately held and family-owned spirits company in the world, its history having started around 1830 when Don Facundo Bacardí Massó emigrated to Cuba and began experimenting with rum in order to make it more refined. His efforts resulted in the world’s first white rum, with the company being officially founded on the 4th of February 1862. And explanation for the bat in the logo? Despite the vaguely vampiric colour scheme, it actually represents a fruit bat, these having living in the rafters of the company’s first distillery.
The story of the crocodile in the Lacoste logo is all down to French tennis legend Rene Lacoste, who earned the nickname “The Crocodile” during the 1920s for promising to win a crucial tennis match in exchange for a crocodile skin briefcase. In 1933, Rene put the distinctive Lacoste logo onto the polo shirts he designed to replace the more uncomfortable, stiff-collared ones usually worn by tennis players at the time. Lacoste had a long-running legal dispute with Crocodile Garments, whose logo was similar to theirs until a commercial compromise led to it being tweaked slightly (more scales, bigger eyes and a different tail angle).
Wrapping Up – Logos that feature Animals
Another interesting infographic is how animals see the world. I would recommend taking a look at it. If you’ve noticed any other interesting patterns in logo design be sure to point them out to us on Facebook or by tweeting @thelogocompany using the #fridayfeature hash tag.