Who designed the two golden arches for McDonald's 1950s restaurant building?

Stanley Clark Meston designed the two golden arches for McDonald's 1950s restaurant building.

Richard and Maurice McDonald hired Meston, an architect based in Southern California, to develop a striking new restaurant design. The brothers wanted the building to be highly visible to passing motorists, and the arches were incorporated into the structure as large yellow architectural forms.

The original arches were physical parts of the restaurant design, rather than the standalone logo used worldwide today. Their shape later inspired the familiar golden-arches symbol, but the architectural design and the later graphic logo were not created by the same person.

This distinction explains a common mix-up: Stanley Clark Meston is associated with the 1950s building arches, while Jim Schindler is credited with combining the arches into the recognizable “M” logo in the early 1960s. The arches became McDonald's most enduring visual asset.