Jim Schindler created McDonald's modern standalone Golden Arches logo in 1962.
The original arches were part of the restaurant architecture designed by Stanley Clark Meston in 1952. As McDonald's expanded, the company needed a compact symbol that could work on signs, packaging, advertisements, and other materials. Schindler combined the two architectural arches into a stylized M.
That change was important because it separated the brand mark from any single restaurant building. The logo could identify a location even when the building's full design was not visible. Its simple shape also reproduced well in print and at roadside scale.
The arches have been redrawn and used with different wordmarks and backgrounds throughout McDonald's history. This sometimes leads people to treat every yellow-arch variation as a separate logo. The central design idea, however, is Schindler's 1962 combination of the two arches into one emblem.