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Logo design: Story behind FedEx logo's hidden arrow (thesneeze.com)
50 points by dirtyaura on July 6, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


Submitted in relation to my comment? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490176 ;-D

It is a great example of logo design though. Another one I love is the Amazon logo, the arrow under the name both forms a cheeky smile and if pointing from a to z indicating that they sell everything from a-z.

This blog post has some others that are quote good as well: http://www.graphicdesignblog.org/hidden-logos-in-graphic-des...


Submitted in relation to my comment?

Indeed, sir. I was intrigued by the design decision to include it.


Also the arrow indicates the flow of the river Amazon (I think).


Great article. My favorite part is this:

"Early on, before the brand rollout in mid-1994, FedEx's public relations agency was preparing to emphasize the arrow as a secondary graphic to underscore the "speed/precision" positioning. They proposed to leverage this in their FedEx communications. Landor put its foot down and said, "No way."

That's why firms like Landor are worth the money. Telling a client "no" is hard, but that's what they're paying for.


This was widely-known and old even in 2004, when the article was posted.


I think that this and Helvetica are the level-zero namedrops in a conversation about logos or typography ;-)


And yet, even though I spend more time than I should on the internets, I'd never heard about it. Also, some of the people on this site would have only been 12 or 13 (or younger!) in 2004 so might not have been that likely to have heard, or at least paid attention to, an article like this at the time.

My point is that just because something is 'old' or 'common knowledge' doesn't necessarily mean that it is actually widely known by people. Probably better to move on and look at something else than waste your energy pointing out that something is 'old'.


Website of the design company (Leader Creative): http://www.leadercreative.com




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