Stanley Meston designed the original McDonald’s restaurant building with its two large yellow arches.
Meston was an architect who worked with the McDonald brothers on a highly visible restaurant design in the early 1950s. The building used two oversized yellow arches as structural and visual features, helping motorists identify the restaurant from the road.
The arches were not initially conceived as the stylized M-shaped logo used today. Their first purpose was architectural branding: they made the restaurant distinctive, colorful, and easy to recognize.
Jim Schindler is associated with the later logo treatment that joined the arches visually. Ray Kroc, by contrast, was the businessman who expanded the franchise system rather than the architect responsible for the original building design.