Who designed the distinctive McDonald’s restaurant buildings that first featured large yellow arches?

Stanley Clark Meston designed the distinctive McDonald’s restaurant buildings that first featured large yellow arches.

Meston was an architect who worked with the McDonald brothers to create a highly visible roadside restaurant design in the 1950s. The buildings used red-and-white colors, a sloping roof, and tall yellow arches that projected above the roofline.

The arches were originally functional architectural elements as well as visual branding. They helped motorists identify the restaurant from a distance, especially along roads where roadside visibility was crucial to attracting customers.

The later Golden Arches logo was not designed by Meston. Jim Schindler converted the two physical arches into the familiar single “M” symbol in 1962. That distinction explains why architectural histories credit Meston with the buildings while logo histories credit Schindler with the graphic mark.