Logos....Then and Now, Good and Bad

Logos are a great design idea to make your business know and easy to recognize. Logos are supposed to be a way for the public to recognize who your company is and what your business is all about. For example, the rainbow colored apple with a bite taken out of it is a symbol for Macintosh (or Mac for short) computers. Macintosh being a type of apple it only seeemed perfect, but instead of going with the traditional red for the apple, they decided to use a rainbow to set it aside from a fruit stand selling apples. Some logos are even more simplistic than that, just using the name of the company and a simple typeface. Like the Gap logo, that had a very simple logo, eveyone loved how simple yet upscale it looked. It was only recently that Gap had changed their logo, and the public was so upset from the changes that the company decided to go back to their origanal logo within a few hours after releasing the new one. This is a perfect example of how important logos are to a company.
Some logos on the other hand can be poorly designed and give the public a completley different interpritation of your business. The intension to create something origanal and effective for a business is in every logo design, however the effectiveness is not always one that is achived. For example, the logo for this Junior Jazz Dance Class shows two people dancing, one male and one female. However, when you look at the bigger picture it becomes an image not suited for any dance class. However, these designs are not usually sent out into the public, many different people review the design before it is released to the client.
Then there are some logos that are perfect and have been with the company for such a long period of time that the public can recognize such an image. For example, the one logo that has been imbeded into out culture is the famous yellow McDonald's "M", so much to the point of young children recognizing the giant "M" and assosiating that with hambergers and french fries. Even through the years famous logos need little teaks and changes to update their look and continue to be in the current "hip" century. To go back to the Macintosh logo design, the new logo for the 21st century is the same bitten-into apple, but instead of the rainbow design, it now looks more matallic with a little starburst shine.
To check out the then and now logos and see the apple "now and then" image: http://theroxor.com/2009/03/26/old-vs-new-great-logo-redesigns/
To check out the poorly designed logos: http://www.artistmike.com/Bad-Logos/BadLogos.html (WARNING: most of these are sexual related)
And to see examples of cleaver logo designs: http://www.graphicdesignblog.org/hidden-logos-in-graphic-designing/