Friday, November 7, 2014

Tech Giant Logo Artists Rewind Time 100 Years

For years, and probably decades, the auto industry was king. I still remember when six of the top ten Fortune 50 companies were automakers or oil companies providing fuel for cars. It wasn't just Chevy who was the "Heartbeat of America." It was the entire auto industry that pushed the bloodstream of our economy.

Times have changed. It's the tech industry in ascendancy. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Alibaba are some of today's biggest companies, none of them part of the auto industry directly, though you might catch some serious bleed-over into that market sector when you see the "smart cars" Google is working on.

What's interesting to me is how less than three decades ago almost none of the tech companies on the forefront of the internet revolution were even conceivable. The eCommerce landscape hadn't even been considered, let alone discovered. What a wild ride we've experienced as the global internet economy was conceived, birthed and begins to mature.

Silicon Valley, 1914
Think of all the words we use now that did not exist back then. What would you think if someone said, "Email me" in 1974? What would "Do a Google search" mean? LOL? What if most of one's problems could be solved in 1974 by rebooting? Whatever that would have meant.

Silicon Valley has changed the world. Or certainly made major contributions to that end.

Recently, a tech startup company called DesignCrowd thought it would be fun to see what the logos of today's tech giants would look like if they existed 100 years ago in 1914. With this as the brief, their community of over 400,000 designers got to work — here are some of the results:


So here's the question. What would your company's logo have looked like 100 years ago?

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