Why the IBM Logo Has Eight Stripes

In 1956 Paul Rand replaced IBM's existing globe-and-letters mark with three slab-serif letters set in a typeface called City Medium. That logo held for sixteen years. The version most people picture, with the horizontal stripes running through the letters, did not appear until 1972.

The stripes were a reproduction problem talking to itself. By the early 1970s IBM letterforms were appearing on Telex printouts, carbon-copy invoices, and the first generations of office photocopiers, all of which fattened black ink and ate fine detail. A solid IBM at small size came out as three blobs. Cutting eight horizontal lines through each letter gave the ink somewhere to bleed; the eye still read the letterforms, but the print stayed crisp.

Rand drew two versions. The eight-stripe mark was the workhorse, used on most signage, packaging and marketing. A more delicate thirteen-stripe version was reserved for formal contexts where the medium was good enough to render fine lines. The eight-stripe became the canonical IBM identity and has not been redrawn since.

This was Rand's pattern. He had already given UPS its shield (1961), ABC its lowercase circle (1962), and Westinghouse its circuit-W (1960), each one tuned to a specific reproduction problem the client actually had. He taught at Yale through most of those years and kept arguing, against the postmodernists who eventually drove him out, that a logo's job was to survive being printed badly.

The stripes are what survival looked like in 1972.