The Best Logos Make You Look Twice

What’s better than a logo you understand immediately?

A logo you understand immediately… and then realise there’s something else hiding inside it.

That’s one of my favourite things in identity design.

Not hidden meaning for the sake of being clever. Not some designer explaining that the triangle represents ‘growth, ambition and the founder’s connection to the mountains’.

I mean the genuinely brilliant stuff.

The detail you don’t necessarily notice at first.

Then someone points it out.

And suddenly you can’t unsee it.

The London Symphony Orchestra logo might be one of the best examples I’ve ever seen.

At first, it’s simply the letters LSO drawn as one beautifully fluid mark.

Then you look again.

There’s a conductor in there.

Head. Body. Arm. Baton.

The letters haven’t been bent around an illustration. The conductor is the lettering.

That’s brilliant.

And also slightly annoying, because it immediately makes you think:

‘I wish I’d thought of that.’

FedEx has been staring at us for years

This is probably the most famous example.

Look between the E and the x in FedEx and the negative space creates an arrow.

Once you see it, it feels completely obvious.

Before you see it, it’s just FedEx.

That’s the magic.

The arrow suggests movement, direction and speed without needing to add a van, a road or some ridiculous swoosh flying around the wordmark.

It’s already there.

And because the idea is built into the typography, it doesn’t make the logo any more complicated.

That’s the difference between clever and trying to look clever.

Amazon goes from A to Z

The Amazon logo does something similar.

At first, it’s just a smile underneath the wordmark.

Friendly. Simple. Familiar.

Then you notice where it starts and where it ends.

The arrow runs from the A to the Z.

That’s the idea.

Amazon sells everything from A to Z.

And the fact that the arrow also doubles as a smile makes it even better.

Two meanings.

One tiny piece of graphic design.

It suggests range, convenience and positivity without adding anything extra.

You don’t need to understand the A-to-Z reference for the logo to work.

But once you spot it, the logo gets smarter.

Toblerone hid a bear in a mountain

I love this one because I must have looked at Toblerone packaging hundreds of times before noticing it.

The mountain is obvious.

The bear isn’t.

But there’s a bear hidden inside it.

The connection comes from Bern, the Swiss city associated with the brand, where the bear has long been a symbol of the city.

Again, the lovely thing is that you don’t have to know any of that for the logo to work.

Mountain.

Switzerland.

Chocolate.

Sorted.

Then you spot the bear and suddenly the mark has another little story buried inside it.

That extra layer doesn’t make the logo work.

It makes you like it more.

There’s a difference.

Baskin-Robbins squeezed 31 into BR

This one is a little more obvious once you know where to look.

The coloured parts of the B and R create the number 31, referencing Baskin-Robbins’ famous original promise of 31 flavours.

It’s a lovely little piece of brand history sitting inside the logo.

But there’s something else I like about it.

You don’t have to spot the 31.

The logo still works perfectly well as BR.

And that feels like an important rule with this kind of design.

The secret should be a reward, not an instruction manual.

The Tour de France put a cyclist in the name

Another one that becomes painfully obvious once somebody points it out.

Look at the Tour de France wordmark and the lettering around the ‘R’, together with the yellow circle, creates a cyclist on a bike.

Of course it does.

You can spend years seeing the logo and think it is just some slightly eccentric lettering.

Then suddenly:

There’s a bloke on a bike.

And now that is all you can see.

Again, it works because the idea belongs there.

It isn’t an unrelated visual trick squeezed into a logo because somebody wanted a clever case study.

It’s the Tour de France.

A cyclist hiding in the Tour de France logo feels completely natural.

And that might be the whole point

The logos I love most in this category all do the same thing.

They work before you know the trick.

LSO still reads as LSO.

FedEx still reads as FedEx.

Amazon still reads as Amazon.

Toblerone still has its mountain.

Then the second idea appears.

And suddenly you get that little moment between the brand and the person looking at it.

‘Ohhh. That’s clever.’

That moment is incredibly valuable.

Because most logos get looked at for about half a second.

We see them on packaging, apps, vans, receipts, football shirts, shopfronts and websites.

Most disappear straight through our heads.

But occasionally a logo gives you a reason to stop.

To look again.

And when you discover something inside it yourself, there’s a tiny sense of ownership to it.

You found the joke.

The danger is designing the trick first

This is where hidden-meaning logos can go horribly wrong.

Because once you start looking at great examples, it becomes very tempting to decide:

‘Our logo needs a hidden thing.’

It probably doesn’t.

That’s how you end up contorting three initials, a squirrel, the outline of New Zealand and a lightning bolt into the same symbol.

Then spending fifteen minutes explaining it.

If the clever idea needs a PowerPoint presentation to reveal itself, it probably isn’t clever enough.

The LSO mark works because the conductor and the letters naturally belong together.

FedEx works because the arrow already exists in the negative space.

Amazon works because the smile and A-to-Z idea are doing two jobs at once.

The best examples feel discovered rather than manufactured.

That’s incredibly difficult to do.

Which is probably why the good ones are so satisfying.

A logo can have more than one job

We talk a lot about logos needing to be simple.

And they do.

But simple doesn’t have to mean shallow.

A simple mark can still contain an idea.

Or two.

It can identify the organisation immediately and then quietly give you something else for noticing.

That’s what the LSO logo does so beautifully.

You see three letters.

Then you see a conductor.

Then you wonder how on earth somebody managed to get both of those things into the same few lines.

And for a designer, that’s the lovely bit.

Not thinking:

‘That looks nice.’

But: