Who refined McDonald’s Golden Arches into the company’s 1962 logo?

Jim Schindler refined McDonald’s Golden Arches into the company’s 1962 logo.

The original arches were architectural elements on McDonald’s restaurants, developed during the redesign of the San Bernardino location in the early 1950s. Their visual outline resembled a large yellow “M,” but the early restaurant structures did not yet use the polished symbol seen on later packaging and signs.

In 1962, Schindler combined the two arches into a unified graphic mark. The design helped transform a building feature into a portable brand identity that could appear on signs, wrappers, advertisements, and company materials. Its strong silhouette also worked well at a distance and in simple one-color applications.

People sometimes attribute every stage of the symbol’s development to Ray Kroc or Stanley Meston. Meston was associated with the architectural design, while Schindler is associated with the later logo refinement. That distinction explains why both names appear in histories of the arches.