Starbucks Logo

Fairly recent news to hit the design world was the changing of the Starbucks logo. What I didn’t know was that before the recent redesigned logo, there were a redesigns of previous ones.


Before analyzing the new logo, I wanted to look at the history of the brand and logo. The logo is made up of the siren, the rings and the text. The first noticeable difference in the first logo was the image of the siren. The siren has a double tail and went from a progression of a lot of lines in the drawing, to a simplification in the line work. The colour of the circle surrounding the image is brown and white. The name of the logo is also different. The name says” STARBUCKS COFFEE-TEA-SPICES. The original owners didn’t sell espresso drinks like they do today. The majority of products were coffee, tea and spices, as the name says.


The next edition of the logo is noticeably different. First noticeable difference is that the brown has now changed to green. The products offered in the previous logo are gone and now reads STARBUCKS COFFEE. Stars on both sides of the logo now replace the dot separators in between the words in the previous logo. The image of the siren is also noticeably different. The ring surrounding the image is now black. The inclusion of the black ring helps to establish the siren as a separate element from the outer title ring. The siren image has now changed to a cleaner lined drawing of the logo. The breasts are now covered (but the belly button is still visible) and the image is created with evenly weighted lines in the tails and hair.



The next logo's siren image has been cropped. Only the sides of the tail are now visible. My critique for this is that without knowing the history of the logo, you wouldn’t know what the sides are.  The double triangular shapes on the ends of the tail are hard to figure out when you don’t know from the old logo that it’s the ends of the tails. 


The progression of the Starbucks logo has come a long way. The new logo has taken out the rings with the text and now simply features the siren as the star. I liked the previous logo more than the new redesign. The way the green text ring fit around a black circle I feel helped to visually separate the elements in the design, while at the same time unified the design by enclosing them in the same repeated circular shape. Although everyone recognizes the siren as the Starbucks logo, even without the text, I think the name added a nicer look. It helped to unify the design and did not compete, but complemented the siren.