McDonald's introduced the Golden Arches as a recognizable brand symbol in 1962.
The symbol grew from the physical architecture of early McDonald's restaurants. Architect Stanley Clark Meston designed distinctive yellow arches for the restaurant buildings, and the company later combined their shapes into the stylized “M” used in corporate identity.
The arches helped customers identify restaurants from a distance, especially beside highways and in growing suburban areas. Their bright yellow color also made the buildings visually distinctive in the restaurant market of the period.
The architecture and the later logo are related but not identical. Early restaurants had actual structural arches, while the corporate mark became a simplified graphic symbol. The Golden Arches are therefore both an architectural reference and one of the world's most recognizable commercial logos.