The best business logos can persist for a long time. Branding has only really existed for just over a century in the sense we know today, and only really since the 1950s have companies really understood the design aesthetics of what makes a logo work. But this isn’t to say that great designs have been custom logo design persisting for a good century. Coca Cola is among one of our most enduring brands, and an example often wheeled out in these cases. The distinctive swirls of the logo were coined early in the twentieth century. Coca Cola is surely among the list of brands most likely to survive for centuries to come, and it’s difficult to imagine that it’s logo design will not remain unchanged.

But if the aesthetics of lasting logo designs are a matter of common knowledge, why is it that we find competitive, healthy companies redesigning so often? Coca Cola is an all-too rare example of a successful design that has simply been repositioned and tweaked, but then, most products don’t enjoy the status of being both the market leader and the market original. It almost seems that even when two brands are created almost simultaneously, whichever can establish its claim to being the original will gain (for a variably indefinite time) the privilege to retain its original branding. The other most continually be seen to innovate. Pepsi has been constantly flitting around Coca Cola’s static design for its entire lifetime. Of course, it isn’t always about playing catch up. The first half century of Pepsi Cola design was essentially carbon copied from the Coca Cola aesthetic, with a signature style design that featured a flowing C, performing the same underlining function seen in the Coca Cola logo.

World War II’s most trivial effect was probably the addition of patriotic red white and blue to the bottle caps of Pepsi Cola bottles, resulting in the circular symbol soon adopted into the brand. You’ll find this circular element a constant an sophisticated fixture of all designs since World War II, but designers have been moving the text inside and outside the logo for fifty years, almost as if they’re unsure what exactly unites the two facets of the design. The Pepsi circle is meaningless by symbolic. The text is typeface is constantly morphing. Every five years or so, Pepsi decides to overhaul its logo.. Coca Cola changes logo with a similar regularity, but its typography is seemingly set in stone.