Stanley Meston created the Golden Arches for McDonald’s first purpose-built restaurant design.
Meston was an architect who worked with McDonald’s in the early 1950s, when the company was developing a recognizable restaurant format for expansion. He designed the building with two large yellow arches rising on opposite sides of the structure, making the restaurant visible from the road.
The arches were originally architectural features rather than a standalone letterform logo. When viewed from an angle, the two structures could suggest an “M,” and McDonald’s later incorporated that visual idea into its corporate identity.
Ray Kroc was the businessman who expanded McDonald’s through franchising, but he was not the architect who designed the original arches. Jim Schindler later developed the familiar overlapping-arches logo, which helped transform the building feature into a global brand symbol.