McDonald's began using the Golden Arches as a logo in 1962 after adapting them from restaurant architecture.
The arches originally served a practical visual purpose on McDonald's buildings. They were designed as striking architectural elements that could make a roadside restaurant easy to recognize. In 1962, designer Jim Schindler combined the two arches into an overlapping “M,” turning the building design into a corporate mark.
This date is often mixed up with 1955, when Ray Kroc established the McDonald's System, or with 1948, when the McDonald brothers introduced their streamlined self-service restaurant format. Those milestones shaped the company, but neither marks the logo's Golden Arches redesign.
The logo subsequently received different lettering and color treatments, yet the arches survived as the brand's core symbol. Their transformation from physical architecture into a graphic logo is one of McDonald's most important branding developments.