Standardising the Golden Arches of the McDonalds Logo

Now and again I go an peek around the inner most depths of some big-wig agency type websites looking for famous logos that I can blog about.

This time round I found this rather interesting Case Study on McDonalds, and specifically the famous Golden Arches, over on Wolff Olins‘ website.

Just look at how many variations of the Golden Arches existed before Wolff Olins came along! What a nightmare!

Whilst you are there you really ought to take a good look around, as there are a number of other interesting things to find.

McDonald’s Case Study
An inconsistent icon
As arguably the third most-recognized icon in the world, it was surprising how inconsistently the McDonald’s brand was presented. A wide range of vendors, agency partners, internal marketing professionals and franchisees needed to gain access to McDonald’s brand assets and found it difficult to do so. This led to work of less than perfect standards across all types of brand touchpoints.
Guide for golden arches
Wolff Olins conducted an extensive global audit of all brand touchpoints. From this information, we worked with Global Marketing to agree on one standard set of McDonald’s golden arches and the basic usage guides around them. We also devised a way to make it easier to produce branded materials – creating an online brand center with assets that even a marketing novice would be able to navigate to find the correct artwork format fit for purpose.