Which architect designed the early McDonald’s restaurants whose roof arches inspired the logo?

Stanley Clark Meston designed the early McDonald’s restaurants whose roof arches inspired the logo.

Meston worked with McDonald’s to create a highly visible restaurant design for the company’s drive-in locations. The buildings featured large yellow arches at the sides of the roof, making the restaurants easy to recognize from the road.

Those architectural arches became the foundation for McDonald’s later graphic identity. In 1962, designer Jim Schindler transformed the two arches into the stylized Golden Arches “M” used in the corporate logo.

The distinction between the two names is important. Meston designed the physical restaurant architecture, while Schindler designed the logo derived from that architecture. Ray Kroc is also frequently connected with the early expansion of McDonald’s, but he was the businessman who developed the franchise system rather than the architect responsible for the arch-shaped buildings.