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1.6 — Names, Brands and Logos Decoded
A brand name is a fossil. It records what a company was doing on the day it was founded, which is almost never what it does now, and it usually records the private joke or the geography of the person who chose it.
Software and the web
Is Adobe the same thing as Acrobat?
Adobe is the company. Acrobat is one of its products. The confusion comes from the fact that the free thing everybody has installed used to be called Adobe Acrobat Reader, so both words appear on the same icon and neither is the name of the file format, which is PDF.
The company was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke after they left Xerox PARC, and it is named after Adobe Creek, a stream that ran behind Warnock's house in Los Altos, California. Their first product was not a program you could buy at all: it was PostScript, a complete programming language for describing a printed page, which a printer would execute to work out where to put ink. That is what made desktop publishing possible, and it is the direct ancestor of PDF.
The name Acrobat was chosen in 1993 for the software that could take a PostScript-style page description and make it viewable and printable on any machine — the acrobatic feat being that the page looked identical everywhere. Reader views PDFs and is free; Acrobat Pro creates and edits them and is not. The format itself was published as an open standard in 2008, which is why dozens of programs now open PDFs without Adobe involved.
Why must the icon file be called favicon.ico?
Because Microsoft shipped it that way in Internet Explorer 5 in 1999 and never provided a mechanism to say otherwise.
The feature was for bookmarks: if a user added your site to Favorites, the browser would try to fetch a small image to display next to the entry. The name is simply favorites icon, contracted, with the .ico extension of Windows' own icon format. The browser did not ask the page where to look — it just requested /favicon.ico from the root of the site, and if the file was there it worked.
Every other browser copied the behaviour to stay compatible, and web server logs have been full of 404 errors for that exact path ever since. The proper mechanism arrived later as a <link rel="icon"> tag in the page's head, which can point at any filename in any format — PNG, SVG, several sizes for different devices. But the root request never went away, because a browser needs an icon before it has parsed the page, and because thirty years of bookmarks depend on it.
Why did www disappear from web addresses?
Because it never meant anything technically, and once it stopped being needed to disambiguate, it was just three syllables of noise.
In the early 1990s an organisation with a domain name ran several services on separate machines. The mail server was mail.example.com, the file server was ftp.example.com, and the new experimental web server was www.example.com. www was a hostname, exactly like the others — the name of one computer in a department. It never had special status in any protocol.
Two things ended it. Serving a website became the default rather than the exception, so a company with one internet presence had no other machine to distinguish it from. And browsers started hiding the prefix in the address bar, so users stopped typing it and stopped seeing it.
There is a genuine technical argument on the other side, which is why large sites often still use it. Cookies set on a bare domain like example.com are sent to every subdomain underneath it, including any subdomain you might one day give to a third party, and the bare domain has restrictions on the kind of DNS record it can carry that a subdomain does not. So www survives as an engineering convenience while being invisible to the reader.
Is the payment company called Visa related to a travel visa?
Not in origin, though the resemblance was clearly welcome.
The card began in 1958 as BankAmericard, issued by Bank of America. When the scheme went international in the 1970s it needed a name that was not tied to one American bank and not tied to any one country. Dee Hock, who ran the organisation, chose Visa in 1976 specifically because it is pronounced almost identically in every major language, is short, and carries a suggestion of being allowed across a border.
The word itself comes from Latin charta visa, "a document that has been seen" — the past participle of videre, to see. A travel visa is literally a note recording that an official looked at your papers and approved them. The card borrows the connotation without the legal meaning.
Why is Bluetooth called Bluetooth, and what is that symbol?
It was a code name that nobody got round to replacing, and the engineer who chose it was reading a historical novel.
In 1997 Jim Kardach of Intel was working on a scheme to let mobile phones and computers from different manufacturers talk to each other over short-range radio. He had been reading The Long Ships, a novel about Vikings, and had taken an interest in Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, the tenth-century king who united the warring Danish tribes and brought Norway in with them. Kardach proposed the name as a placeholder because the project was doing the same thing to a set of incompatible radio standards.
The marketing name that was supposed to replace it was PAN, for Personal Area Network, but a trademark search found the term already crowded, and by then Bluetooth had shipped in the specification and stuck.
The logo is not an abstract design. It is a bind rune: the Younger Futhark letters ᚼ (Hagall, H) and ᛒ (Bjarkan, B) — Harald Blåtand's initials — superimposed. As for the king's own nickname, the usual explanation is a dead or discoloured tooth, though it may be a mistranslation of a word meaning dark-haired.
And why is Wi-Fi called Wi-Fi?
It means nothing. This is the rare case where a name was deliberately built to look like it means something.
The standard is IEEE 802.11, which is unmarketable. In 1999 the industry group hired a brand consultancy, Interbrand, which produced Wi-Fi as a short, memorable phrase echoing hi-fi. The trade group briefly attached a tagline, "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity", which is where the folk etymology comes from — but wireless fidelity is not a thing, it does not describe anything, and the group dropped the tagline once it realised the phrase was creating confusion. The name came first and the expansion was invented afterwards to justify it.
Why are programming languages named after a coffee and a snake?
Java was developed at Sun Microsystems from 1991 as Oak, named after a tree outside James Gosling's window. That name turned out to be trademarked by another technology company, so the team held a naming session and picked Java — American slang for coffee, after the Indonesian island whose coffee trade made it so — reportedly while drinking a great deal of it. The steaming cup logo followed the name, not the other way round.
Python has nothing to do with snakes. Guido van Rossum started it in December 1989 and named it after Monty Python's Flying Circus, which he had been watching scripts of. He wanted something short, slightly irreverent, and memorable. The two-snake logo arrived much later from a design competition, and the humour survives in the language's own documentation, where the traditional example variables are spam and eggs rather than foo and bar.
Companies
Where did Google's name come from?
From a spelling mistake, and the mistake was an improvement.
A googol is a real mathematical term for 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was coined in 1938 by the nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner, who had asked him what to call a very large number. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted a name conveying the enormous quantity of pages they intended to index. A colleague checking domain availability in 1997 typed google.com, it was free, and they registered it.
The company later leaned into the original joke: its headquarters is called the Googleplex, after googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol of zeros — a number with more digits than the observable universe has atoms.
Why is Amazon called Amazon?
Jeff Bezos first registered the company in 1994 as Cadabra, from abracadabra. He abandoned it after a lawyer misheard it on the phone as "cadaver".
Going through a dictionary, he settled on Amazon for two stated reasons. It described what he wanted the business to be — the Amazon is the largest river in the world by volume, many times the next largest, and he was planning a store many times the size of any bookshop. And it began with A, which mattered a great deal in 1994, because directories of websites were alphabetical lists and being near the top of one was free traffic.
The arrow in the logo runs from the a to the z, meaning everything from A to Z, and doubles as a smile.
Why is Apple called Apple, and what is the bite for?
Steve Jobs had been working at an apple orchard on a commune and was on a fruit diet at the time. By his own account he suggested the name after returning from the orchard, thought it sounded "fun, spirited and not intimidating", and told his co-founders that if nobody produced a better name by five o'clock, Apple it was. Being ahead of Atari — his previous employer — in the phone book was a stated bonus.
The bite in the logo, designed by Rob Janoff in 1977, is routinely claimed to honour Alan Turing, who died beside a partly eaten apple laced with cyanide. Janoff has said directly and repeatedly that this is not true. The bite is there so that the silhouette reads as an apple rather than a cherry or a tomato at small sizes — a scale problem, solved with a notch.
Why is a Michelin star awarded by a tyre company?
Because the company wanted people to drive further and wear out more tyres.
In 1900 there were fewer than three thousand cars in all of France. André and Édouard Michelin published a free guide for that tiny market listing petrol stations, mechanics, hotels and places to eat, on the straightforward theory that anything that increased motoring increased tyre sales. Restaurant ratings appeared in the 1920s, the star system in 1926, and the three-star scale in 1936.
The definitions have not changed since: one star is very good cooking in its category, two is worth a detour, three is worth a special journey. The words detour and journey are not accidental. The whole scheme was built around getting a car onto a road.
Logos and the stories attached to them
Is the BMW badge a spinning propeller?
Almost certainly not, though the company itself promoted the idea for decades.
The roundel dates from 1917 and uses the blue and white of the Bavarian state flag, in a circular arrangement — with the colours reversed, because Bavarian trademark law at the time forbade using state symbols directly in a commercial mark. The letters around the rim stand for Bayerische Motoren Werke.
The propeller story comes from a 1929 advertisement showing the badge superimposed on a spinning aircraft propeller, at a time when BMW was building aero engines and wanted the association. BMW's own historians have since acknowledged the aviation reading was retrofitted marketing. It is a good example of a company adopting a myth about itself because the myth sold better than the trademark law.
What are the Olympic rings actually?
Five interlocking rings in blue, yellow, black, green and red on white, designed by Pierre de Coubertin in 1913. Coubertin wrote that the five rings represent the five inhabited continents joined together, and that the six colours including the white background were chosen because every national flag in the world at that time contained at least one of them.
The widespread claim that a specific colour maps to a specific continent — yellow for Asia, black for Africa and so on — is not in Coubertin's writing and is explicitly rejected by the International Olympic Committee. It seems to have been invented in a 1951 handbook and taught in schools ever since.
Why is the FedEx logo famous among designers?
Because of the arrow you cannot unsee once you have seen it — the white space between the E and the x forms a forward-pointing arrow. It was designed by Lindon Leader in 1994, who has said he built the custom letterforms specifically to make that negative space work, and then deliberately never drew attention to it.
The reason designers use it as the standard example is what it demonstrates: the shape carries the meaning — speed and forward motion — without any element on the page saying so, and a viewer who spots it feels they discovered it rather than were told it. That feeling of discovery is worth more than the same message stated plainly.
When a brand becomes the word
Why do we say "Xerox" and "Google" as verbs, and why do companies hate it?
Because the product arrived before the category had a name, so the brand became the word for the thing. Xerox for photocopying, Google for searching, Band-Aid for an adhesive plaster, Velcro for hook-and-loop, Thermos for a vacuum flask, Escalator for a moving staircase, Aspirin for acetylsalicylic acid.
The last three are in that list for a specific reason: they were trademarks and are not any more. A trademark protects a name that identifies one company's product. Once the courts accept that ordinary people use the word to mean the product category regardless of who made it, the mark has become generic and the protection is lost. Bayer lost Aspirin and Heroin in the United States after the First World War; Otis lost Escalator in 1950; Thermos went the same way in 1963.
That is why Xerox ran advertisements in design magazines asking people not to use its name as a verb, why Adobe's style guide insists on "edited in Photoshop" rather than "photoshopped", and why Google's own trademark guidelines specify that you google using Google Search. It reads as corporate fussiness. It is a company trying not to lose its own name.
What comes next
The last page of this Part is about the numbers on the objects rather than the names — the barcode on a packet, the expiry date and how it is actually calculated, the sixteen digits on your card that contain a checksum, and why every sheet of paper in the world outside North America is the shape it is.