(Image credit: Visalia/Jaguar/X/World Games 2025 Chengdu/Future)
As another year comes to a close, we're finally in a position to take a look back at the year in logos. As usual, we've seen a ton of new icons, symbols and wordmarks in 2024, with some refining existing assets, and others offering brand new designs. Some are worthy of our best logos roundup, while others belong in the design hall of shame.
From rebrands to new brands, we've seen more logos than ever over the last twelve months, with some hogging headlines and others offering more subtle refinements. Here's our roundup of the best (and worst) of the year.
The best:
01. Mazda
(Image credit: Mazda)
While it hasn't announced it officially, Mazda this year trademarked a new logo. Like most new car logos, it's a flatter take on the existing design – but we think it was a necessary change for the brand.
The Japanese brand has been trying to move upmarket, but it's been doing so with a logo that's starting to look very dated. The new design follows the trend in recent car logo redesigns, but it's a much better fit. It's recognisable (unlike the Kia logo), and it would serve Mazda's efforts to shift its brand appeal from a young audience to focus on a higher-end market.
02. The 2025 World Games logo
(Image credit: World Games 2025)
A new logo with an optical illusion? Yes, please. And it's adorable one. Created by British designer John Fairley, the Chengdu 2025 World Games logo features geometric shapes symbolising the interconnected fate of humanity and respect for cultural diversity, but it also has a little Easter egg. The top section (coloured black) looks like the face of a panda, which Chengdu is famous for.
03. The National Football Museum logo
(Image credit: National Football Museum)
The National Football Museum logo is a goal. Literally. Proof that simplicity is often the way to go with logo design, the icon is inspired by a goal and a ball. But designing such a minimalist logo in a way that allows easy interpretation is a huge challenge. Poke Marketing achieved this by using the shape of a goal viewed at an angle rather than face on.
The worst:
01. Jaguar
(Image credit: Jaguar)
The entire Jaguar rebrand of 2024 has been mocked to oblivion, with the marketing images featuring diverse and colourfully dressed characters bearing most of the brunt. But the logo has proven unpopular too.
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Jaguar calls the wordmark "a powerful celebration of modernism – geometric form, symmetry and simplicity – demonstrating the unexpected by seamlessly blending upper and lowercase characters in visual harmony." But the design was quickly parodied by several other brands on social media, who jokingly presented versions of their own logos featuring a similar mix of upper and lowercase characters.
02. Visalia
(Image credit: City of Visalia)
The people of Visalia, California, were not impressed one bit when it was announced that the city's elaborately illustrated logo would be replaced with a flat minimalist design that was described by one person as "so oversimplified it's comedic." People complained that the design "sterilized" the city's personality and rendered its landmarks unrecognisable. So fervent was the response that authorities have tossed out the redesign and reopened submissions to seek a new, new logo.
03. X TV
(Image credit: X)
Elon Musk has a difficult relationship with logo design. The Tesla logo has an unfortunate likeness to something else, and SpaceX at one point appeared to be using the logo of a small Scottish football club. With Twitter's rebranding to X, it seems he gave up altogether, using a simple unicode character that an imaginative Twitter user claimed he had 'designed'. So the X TV logo was perhaps predictably anticlimactic.
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Daniel John is Design Editor at Creative Bloq. He reports on the worlds of design, branding and lifestyle tech, and has covered several industry events including Milan Design Week, OFFF Barcelona and Adobe Max in Los Angeles.
