Yellow trucking may be shutting down, but its logo remains iconic

This week’s shutdown of the trucking giant Yellow in advance of an anticipated bankruptcy declaration has imperiled 30,000 jobs at the nearly century-old company, which has for years struggled with financial problems and debt. All things considered, the potential disappearance of its logo is admittedly a trivial concern. But as someone who specializes in the study of logos and is on record as declaring the Yellow logo my all-time favorite, I think the mark deserves a proper eulogy. The Yellow logo represents something that has become foreign in today’s world of branding, where characteristics like charm, whimsy, and weirdness seem to be in short supply.

Yellow’s logo is simple enough: the word Yellow in robust, no-nonsense all-caps sans-serif black type within a similarly-sturdy, black-bordered trapezoidal holding shape that is colored a lovely shade of, well . . . orange. The cognitive dissonance inspired by the tension between the color in the name and the color in the logo is enough to imbue the mark with a tinge of uncanniness. It’s not like the jolt of the Stroop Effect, the psychological discomfort we feel when we see, for instance, the wordblue written in red ink; it’s subtler, less jarring, and more mysterious. Seeing the logo, for a moment, we question ourselves: Is that color actually yellow? We are left to wonder just what the heck is going on.

The answer lies in the company’s long history. Founded in 1924 and named Yellow due to an early affiliation with the famous taxi concern Yellow Cab, the trucking company decided to paint its vehicles orange in order to make them more visible on the road for the sake of traffic safety. Even the delightful name of the particular hue that was chosen, Swamp Holly Orange, represents a stroke of branding genius that puts to shame today’s marketing wizards who call white “Starlight” and black “Midnight.” Following the acquisition of fellow trucking firm Roadway in 2003, Yellow took some branding missteps that included a soulless renaming of the company to YRC before fully recommitting to the Yellow brand in 2021.

The Yellow logo’s quirkiness, then, is a bit of a historical accident, one that has been assisted by the fact that Yellow is not consumer-facing, even though its trucks have essentially served as mobile billboards, putting its logo before the eyes of the motoring public. Companies like these avoid much of the pressure to conform to prevailing norms and changing styles in branding, and can often get away with levels of oddness and whimsy in logo design that are rarely seen elsewhere.

Of course, you won’t often see such examples on television or phone screens. You’ll need to look in places that you would not otherwise notice. In a culvert by the side of the road, you might spy the playful logo of J&J Drainage of Hutchinson, Kansas. The striking bulldozer mark of Breinholt Contracting might only be spotted at a construction site, along with that of Pinnacle Grading & Heavy Equipment. Did its designer level the literal pinnacle at the top of the A in an ironic nod to the company’s raison d’être?

Logos such as these are often disparaged as examples of vernacular or naive design; their charm is dismissed as evidence of their unseriousness. Franco Grignani, designer of the Woolmark logo, which was named the best logo ever by Creative Review in 2011, wrote of logo design in 1967 that “at times the symbol is built within the commercial enterprise by designers who have no graphic training; in this case we have the originality of incompetence.”

In my opinion, however, these quirky logos still have great potential to serve as meaningful symbols. They are organic and authentic, not contrived or pretentious. Yellow’s orange started out not as branding at all, but as a functional aspect of the company’s commitment to safety, making it all the more effective as branding now.

Of course, the Yellow logo would not fly as a new creation today; the fear of social media mockery would be enough to scuttle it. That’s why its looming departure is so disappointing. Once an unusual logo like Yellow’s is gone, its replacement is certain to be more conventional, more safe, and less interesting.

James I. Bowie is a sociologist at Northern Arizona University who studies trends in logo design and branding. He reports on his research at his website, Emblemetric.com.