McDonald's introduced its joined Golden Arches logo in 1962.
The design turned two architectural arches into a recognizable letter M, making the restaurant's roadside identity easier to recognize even from a distance. Jim Schindler, a McDonald's engineering and design consultant, is credited with developing the version that connected the arches.
Earlier McDonald's restaurants used arches as physical parts of their buildings, but the 1962 mark transformed that architectural feature into a compact corporate symbol. This distinction matters because the arches existed before the familiar logo did.
The emblem later appeared in many simplified forms and became one of the world's most recognizable commercial symbols. A common mix-up is attributing the joined logo to the 1950s, when the arches were already associated with the restaurants but had not yet been combined into the famous M-shaped mark.