The fuss about changing the Cracker Barrel logo got crowded off the so-called news by much more noteworthy and tragic events at the time, but I found myself still wondering just what it was all about. I’ve since learned that there are over six hundred Cracker Barrel restaurants in our nation and I’ve never even seen one, let alone eaten in one, so I have no reason to either approve or object to the changes in the restaurants or the logo. The outcry seemed to center around the fact that the changes destroy some essence of old-time country life and values that people like to imagine they themselves still live by.. It does seem odd, though, that Iowa, being about as “country” as you can get, doesn’t have one in every small town or at least in every county.

I began to wonder about the changes in other logos that have been familiar to me for most of my life and discovered that nearly all of them have undergone alterations that the public in general hardly noticed and certainly didn’t object very loudly to. My research brought about considerable confusion. For instance, I learned that the Twinings Tea logo is considered the oldest continuing logo, having been used in England since 1787. I found multiple versions, some with, and most without, the original golden lion as part of the design. I guess “continuing” doesn’t mean “unchanged” even though it is listed as such. Confusion led me to assume that the only unchanged feature is the name Twinings. The company makes more than 500 different tea-based products and apparently each product bears its own version of the logo.

As for American products, the oldest recognizable logos in use today include Baker’s Chocolate which has been around since the 1780’s. 1879 brought us Underwood’s Deviled Ham, still made in Boston, and the very familiar Levi Strauss label appeared in 1886, shortly after its Two-Horse logo had been introduced. Today’s most recognizable logos are found on products from Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple, Nike, Google and Amazon.

For some time I wondered about that little notch in the purple feather of the stylized peacock’s tail of the NBC Television logo. I discovered that it was added in 1986 and was meant to turn that feather into the additional image of a peacock’s head, thus giving the impression that the bird is facing us rather than showing us his behind. I get that, but why aren’t the feathers all peacock blue? Granted, peacocks are showy and colorful but not rainbow-hued. It seems the logo was introduced to mark the transition of NBC from black and white to color broadcasting in 1956. There were originally eleven different colored feathers; too many to assume they were meant to represent the colors of the rainbow and too few to represent the full range of colors available – and why were they later reduced to just six colors?

I suspect that the six-feathered tail began as simply a symmetrical design that looked good on the television screen and someone assigned a :meaning to each color. I see no relationship of the colors to the aspects of NBC that have been assigned to them, but here is what I learned. Yellow is meant to represent news, orange is for sports, red means entertainment, purple stands for stations, blue for network and green for productions.

I was surprised to learn that some aspects of brand logos are fairly obvious once you know about them. Have you ever noticed the arrow hidden in the negative space of the FedEx logo, since it was shortened from Federal Express in 1994? Or do you realize that the arrow that doubles as a smile in the Amazon logo goes literally from a to z? One of those supposedly hidden messages hasn’t been a secret from me for a long time. Sitting in traffic at stoplights, I’ve had ample opportunity to study the emblems on the backs of the cars ahead of me and I’ve known for some time that all those circles and ovals in the Toyota logo are also the letters that spell its name. Look around – you’ll be surprised.