While the brand name Xerox is forever associated with printers and scanners, its origins in fact go all the way back to the turn of the 20th century. In its first form it was the Haloid Photographic Company—a producer of photographic paper. In the 1950s it changed its name to Haloid Xerox, and finally, to simply Xerox. While photo paper and printing hardware might not qualify as revolutionary in themselves, Xerox happened to invent a number of other supplementary technologies along the way that turned out to be pretty important. In fact, astronomically important. The Graphical User Interface, the mouse and ethernet all came out of Xerox Parc in the 1970s and 80s. Xerox sometimes seems like a company that was never quite able to realize the importance of its own inventions, and the evolution of its graphic . In the 1960s it dropped the torch that accompanied its Haloid days in favor of an iconic typeface with thin ligatures and a squared, zero-like “O.” Unfortunately, its development since then has been rocky.
In 1994 the design agency Landor attempted to bring Xerox’ logo into the digital era by simplifying it to an “X” and adding some pixelation, which was typical for graphic interfaces of the time. Obviously this was bound to become outdated, however. Their 2008 logo evolution, a generic web 2.0-style icon complete with clumsy gradient and shine effects, is a very poor showing. Hewlett-Packard, est. 1939 - tech branding: HP logo evolution Stanford grads William Hewlett and James Packard started their company in a garage in 1939. Their sms marketing service first product was an audio oscillator, which they managed to make for a fraction of the cost of their competitors’. They got into the semiconductor game in the 1960s, and in 1968 they created the first device to ever be called a personal computer. Since then they have expanded their business by moving into calculators, scanners, printers and the like. Their initial logo, which they kept until 1974, featured the founders’ initials with long ascenders and descenders breaking through a slim ring. In the 1980s this was enclosed within a blue rectangle, and in 2010 this shrunk into a circle and became a lighter shade of blue.