Written by Richard Baird, founder of LogoArchive, the world’s largest historical logo book with over 5,500 curated logos, and of LogoHistories, home to 200+ in-depth logo histories.
Interlocking logos link two or more forms so that each passes over and under, or through, the other. Unlike forms that simply overlap, interlocked shapes appear physically connected, as though they could not be pulled apart.
That makes the technique a natural way of expressing connection: partnership, merger, community and unity. It was particularly popular in the post-war period with conglomerates, associations and international organisations seeking to show many parts working as one.
Bruce Blackburn’s 1974 logo for United Banks of Colorado weaves bands over and under one another into a single knot, an apt image for a group of banks working together.
The best-known example is the Olympic rings. Pierre de Coubertin began work on them in 1913, linking five equal rings to represent the union of the five continents. The interlocking form expresses the meeting of the world’s athletes, and the idea likely drew on the USFSA logo, which Coubertin co-founded, with its two interlocking red and blue rings.
Interlocking can also bind letters together. The 1973 WHSmith logo, designed by Richard Guyatt with Nick Jenkins, Ian Middleton and Jane-Ann Withers, interlocks a W, an H and a dominant S into a cube, a form that draws on the idea of a gift.
Sometimes the interlacing suggests a material. Franco Grignani’s 1964 Woolmark criss-crosses three striped bands like a ball of wool.
Kyösti Varis’s 1980 logo for the Finnish insurer Sampo links rounded forms together like the links of a chain.
Eugen and Max Lenz’s 1948 logo for Schweizer Europahilfe, a Swiss foreign aid organisation, interlaces a single band into a square knot, a symbol of support that holds together.
The challenge is clarity. Every crossing must read clearly as over or under, often through small gaps cut into the line, and those details have to survive at small sizes and in a single colour.
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