Apple: Probably few remember the original Apple logo, which featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with the inscription ‘“Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone.” Thankfully, within a year, Jobs was introduced to Rob Janoff, a young designer based in Palo Alto, California who was assigned to help market the clunky Apple II, a far cry from today’s sleek MacBook. “For inspiration, the first thing I did was go to the supermarket, buy a bag of apples and slice them up,” recalled Janoff in an interview with Sync Magazine. “I just stared at the wedges for hours.” Eventually, Janoff created the polychromatic Apple logo which survived until 1998.
BP: Founded in 1909, British Petroleum’s (BP) original logo was designed by an amateur who submitted his emblem in a company-wide competition. “A Mr. AR Saunders from the purchasing department won an employee competition in 1920 to design the first BP mark, a boxy ‘B’ and ‘P’ with wings on their edges, set into the outline of a shield,” the company notes on its site. BP, which is now officially incorporated as BP p.l.c., updated its logo in 2000, incorporating green and yellow, perhaps as a means to associate a “green” mentality with the company. Lauded by marketing gurus at first, the logo was later scrutinized (and lampooned) in 2010, when BP became responsible for perhaps the world’s worst oil spill.
