The McDonald’s logo feature made from two arches is the Golden Arches M. Designer Jim Schindler combined the restaurant’s separate architectural arches into a single stylized letterform in 1962.
The design gave McDonald’s a compact symbol that could work on signs, packaging, advertisements, and corporate materials. Unlike the original arches, which depended on the shape of a particular building, the combined M could travel with the brand wherever McDonald’s opened a restaurant.
The Golden Arches M is often confused with the restaurant’s original building design. The buildings had two distinct arches positioned at the sides, while the logo presents them as a unified graphic. The color yellow also became strongly associated with the mark, although logo treatments have varied by era and market. This shift from architecture to graphic identity helped McDonald’s develop a consistent international visual language.