for people who are into brand logos ...

This elaborate thing on the left is Apple's first logo (wow, what's going on there??). Firefox's logo dev is also awesome. As is Nike's (created at the time when Nike was still making great running shoes). Microsoft's first logo (1975) came straight from Studio 54, an uncanny resemblance to which made way for a brief (but nonetheless scary) thought of Bill Gates doing disco. Fiat's first logo was apparently made in the Roman Empire, and Cannon started w the name "Kwanon" and a Shiva look-alike creature (then prob figured that it may come across as "too foreign" in the US market). Texaco & Siemens's unwittingly made their logos too similar to ideological symbols. My fav thus far is Buick's logo (part 1 and part 2) with a dude smoking a pipe while walking on the globe and dragging something on the wheels that i can't name or recognize. At first, I thought that people from the past had a lot of time on their hands, but then I realized something else: a trend towards symbolization (and not just simplification) of logos. Logos are often defined as signifiers of something intangible = brand. And ok, they have over time become less&less iconic, and more&more symbolic. For example, Shell's first logo was, um, a photo of a shell. Volkswagen's first logo was a chopper wings. So, what have enabled this symbolization of the signifier? Well .... the brand itself. This really is a no great discovery, and more interesting to me than saying that we all share similar brand concepts that can be made visible via our habitual responses to logos, I find the question of does anyone still really care? I mean, it's truly awesome that Wal-Mart's logo is now green, or that Starbucks for a sec went back to its brown roots. But, so what? Logos apparently today refer to nothing else but to symbolic version of their past selves (as this list shows real nice). I totally get it that they had some role when no one knew what a brand represented (like, the first thing when you think Buick is obviously a dude walking on a globe) and they have to be as close to *reality* as possible but when people became familiar with the brands (and figured which ones are pure crap) does it even matter than logos became more symbolic? Not only do I suspect that Apple would have the same market cap even with that weird, straight-from-brothers-Grimm logo above, but I am also pretty sure that people would actually REACT THE SAME if you displayed to them brand names in just plain black&white text & generic font. So maybe it's time to stop talking about logos and start getting used to the fact that a brand can be something tangible.