Monday, October 4, 2010

Starbucks Coffee

It's was Sunday. Everyone on Thompson Housing Building was settling down at the end of loaded weekend. I begin to cram in my homework that is due for the following day. After mindlessly passing through a few readings, I realized that I cannot continue my homework with only 5 hours of drifting in and out of sleep. So why not better the situation with a Grande Caramel Macchiato from the the world's biggest coffeehouse company?

(Image by me, Daniel Daquigan)

Starbucks Coffee has become a world renown symbol of the twenty first century. And many college students in the United States turn to it as fuel for the day's tasks. The world grabs this cup on a daily basis, passing through the day without realizing the icon that rests in their hand with every sip of coffee. The famous green icon on each Starbucks cup is a product of logo design that has gone through many transformations, as all logos do. With all the changes that the Starbucks logo went through, many people cannot make out the what exactly is in the center of the well-known trademark. From the mere image, we can at least make out that there is a woman wearing some sort of crown. But, again, what exactly is this woman? A Starbucks Princess? A queen of coffee?

Undergoing multiple redesigns, the Starbucks trademark started off as a logo similar to its present-day logo.

Originally brown, the first Starbucks logo features a complete image of the woman present in its current logo. But by looking at the original design, the woman is shown to be a two-tailed mermaid. The Starbucks logo depicts a siren, an enchanting female figure that seductively lures seafarers, according to Greek mythology. With such a symbol, Starbucks uses the image of the siren to represent their coffee as irresistible and high in quality.

The design of every logo has some sort of meaning behind its portrayal. With Sunday's Starbucks cup now pinned to the wall behind my desk as I write this post, I look at the two-tailed siren that faces me and continue to become infatuated with the meaning and the design of the Starbucks logo.

(Image by me, Daniel Daquigan)

No comments:

Post a Comment