This question comes from a post that I saw on Quora asking what the laziest famous logos created are.
To create the list I first had to decide what constituted a famous logo. I decided to choose from only Fortune 500 companies.
The Fortune 500 list is created by the Fortune magazine each year and it ranks the 500 largest companies in the United States.
Now that we have chosen a list of logos to review we had to decide what constitutes “lazy”.
I had to actually look up the definition of a lazy as many of the logos on the list are quite are iconic despite being simple. Here is what I found:
“Lazy: characterized by lack of effort or activity.”
If we use this definition of lazy we will be only reviewing logos which look as though they did not receive any effort or thought.
Luckily for us, many of the logos on the list are similar to the original logo concepts for the company. Though many of the companies have gone through rebrand they are often just iterations of the original logo.
There is a great read on Medium about what makes a lazy logo if you are interested. Now on to our list:
1. Walmart
2. Verizon
3. GM
4 Freddie Mac
5. New York Life
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6. US Bank
7. Northrop Group
8 Lowe’s
9 Bershire Hathaway
10. Microsoft
11. Best Buy
12 Time Warner
13. Dollar General
14. Gap Logo (old)
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15. Office Depot
16. Wells Fargo
17. Conoco Phillips
18. P & G
19. SoftBank
20. Ebay
21. H&R Block
A difficulty when choosing from the logos is trying to separate the actual design from your understanding of the brand. I think you could make the argument that a brand like Nike has a very simple and “lazy” logo. Yet when you have billions and billions of dollars to put behind the logo in a marketing campaign, it is easy to forget that it is an unflattering logo.
Let us know in the comments section below if there are any logos that we missed that you think we should add!
