A brand’s logo has a lot of heavy lifting to do. The logo should hint at the product type and ooze the brand’s spirit. It should be stylish yet timeless. And it should do all this without looking quite like anything else.

Yet a logo needs to be light as a feather. If the consumer needs to think about it, it’s dead in the water. A logo should be eloquent, effortless, effervescent.

When a graphic designer begins a new logo, they balance the need for originality against the need for instant recognition. Rather than choosing a graphic design style, they should wield a deep knowledge of the looks that have gone before and understand the connotations of those styles today.

A strong logo can undergo a revamp without losing its essence. But can it resist being dominated by one of graphic design’s cornerstone styles? To find out — and provide a graphic design style primer — the team at Kapwing has recreated the McDonald’s logo in these six essential styles:

Art nouveau. An elegant, sinuous, romantic style from the turn of the 20th century.
Bauhaus. An avant-garde design school that favored functionalism, geometrics, and space.
Psychedelic. Acid-colored patterns and stream-of-conscious lines that have bedazzled beholders since the 1960s.
Pop art. Kitsch, comic-style pop culture references channeling 1950s Americana through Andy Warhol’s eyes.
Retro ’80s. The grids, vector curves, clipart, and blocky fonts of 1980s computer graphics sprinkled with that weird ’80s sense of glamor.
3D design. Playful renders popping out of the screen with more or less fidelity to realism.

Image Credit: McDonald’s.

McDonald’s Original Logo

It’s hard to imagine McDonald’s without the golden arches. But when it was just the McDonald brothers in their shack with a fryer, they favored a jaunty comic script atop their then-mascot, the troubling burger chef, Speedee … troubling because Speedee was both a burger and a chef.

The ghost of Speedee haunts the rock ‘n roll burger boy of our 1950s pop art style McD’s logo. But the versions that retain prominent arches demonstrate the power of a simple motif to conjure a brand’s aftertaste in your mouth.

McDonald’s is going through a big identity crisis lately, not least rebranding its Twitter handle in the style of South Korean boy band phenomenon BTS. Can the arches bear the strain?

Scroll on for a closer look at each style.

Image Credit: McDonald’s.