McDonald's introduced the Golden Arches logo in its familiar connected form in 1962.
Before the corporate logo appeared, individual McDonald's buildings often used large yellow arches as architectural features. The arches were visible from the road and helped restaurants stand out, but they were not yet the unified symbol used across the company.
In 1962, the two arches were combined into an “M” for a standardized graphic identity. This change helped McDonald's apply the same visual mark to signs, packaging, advertisements, and other branded materials.
The date is sometimes confused with 1953, when an early restaurant using the arches opened in Phoenix, or 1968, when the logo received another refinement. Those dates concern the buildings and later design history, not the original connected logo.