Google Products

Picasa 

The Picasa logo, a logo for a Google software package with which you can manage and edit your personal pictures, is a stylized representation of an old fashioned shutter mechanism. The opened shutter shows the whitespace of a house, referring to  Casa and to the fact it's for home and/or personal use. The 'Pi' part in the wordmark most likely stands for pixel.

Pi + casa  = Pi stands for pixels and casa is an italian word meaning house.

GMAIL :

 The GMAIL logo was designed just one night before the launch of product. Initially designed in the Catull font or so called Google font the G MAIL logo finally changed and then only the letter 'G' was kept in Catull font.
The "m," of course, appears as a small envelope, the ubiquitous Gmail symbol we have come to know well.

Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, an Internet-based free multilingual encyclopedia, is an unfinished globe constructed from jigsaw pieces—some pieces are missing at the top—inscribed with glyphs from many different writing systems. As displayed on the web pages of the English-language version of Wikipedia, there is a wordmark "Wikipedia" under the globe, and below that the text "The Free Encyclopedia", in the free open-source Linux Libertine font.

Each piece bears a glyph (letter or character), symbolizing the multilingualism of Wikipedia. They include the Cyrillic letter И (“I”), the Greek letter Ω (Omega), the Korean syllabic block 위 (wi), the Arabic letter و (Waw), the Chinese character 維 (Wéi), the Hindi akshar वि (Wi) at the left, the Bangla borno উ (U) , the Kannada akshara ವಿ (Vi) at the bottom, the Hebrew (and also Yiddish) letter ו (Vav), the Georgian ვ (Vin) and at the uppermost left the Armenian Վ (Vev). As with the Latin letter “W”, these glyphs are in most cases the first glyph of the name “Wikipedia” rendered in that language (for example, 維基大典 in Classical Chinese; similarly the Japanese katakana ウィ makes the sound “wi”).

The empty space at the top represents the (incomplete) nature of the project, and languages yet to be added.

wikipedia's current logo

WWF(World Wide Fund for Nature)

The inspiration came from Chi-Chi: a giant panda that had arrived at the London Zoo in the year 1961, when WWF was being created.
Aware of the need for a strong, recognisable symbol that would overcome all language barriers, WWF’s founders agreed that the big, furry animal with her appealing, black-patched eyes would make an excellent logo.
British environmentalist and artist Gerald Watterson played a key role in the original panda logo by producing the initial sketches.

Based on these, Sir Peter Scott, one of the organisation’s founders, drew the first logo, and said at the time:

“We wanted an animal that is beautiful, is endangered, and one loved by many people in the world for its appealing qualities. We also wanted an animal that had an impact in black and white to save money on printing costs.”

The strongest design improvement came in 1986 when the viewer was left to fill in the gaps in order to complete the symbol.
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Update: 09 June 2011
Jerry Kuyper added this comment to the thread below:
The firm responsible for the 1986 work was the San Francisco office of Landor. Tom Suiter was the creative director, I was the design director and Jenny Leibundgut was the primary designer.
Prior to our work WWF was using two different pandas, one in the USA (a colder, more geometric version of the 1978 version) and one for the rest of the world.
As I remember, our working attributes were:
- not too cuddly
- not too ferocious
- and most certainly, not about to go extinct
We looked at a dozen ways to add details to the eyes before realizing the obvious — the solid black shapes were the most engaging and open to interpretation.
It is very gratifying to see that the mark has lasted 25 years without the addition of any swooshes, glows or reflections.
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The black-and-white panda has since come to stand as a symbol for the conservation movement as a whole.

Audi

Shape of Audi Logo:
Audi Logo comprises of four 3-dimensional overlapping rings which now appear sharper with a more of a polished chrome look, depict the 1932 merger of Audi with DKW, Horsh and Wanderer, and signifies strength and security.

 

Color of Audi Logo:
The slightly darker colors used in the Audi logo give it a more shinny and defined look. The aluminum silver in the rings represents innovative power and lightweight design, an Audi core competency that set the brand apart.

New Audi Logo:
The new look to the logo is a message by the company to its customers and employees to render more innovative and efficient designs. It is hoped that the new Audi logo, implemented in August 2009, works for the company and further strengthens its bond with its customers.

Google Logo

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol", which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original paper on PageRank:"We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10^100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines."
Google has had many logos since its renaming from BackRub. The current official Google logo was designed by Ruth Kedar, and is a wordmark based on the Catull typeface.

In 1998, Sergey Brin created a computerized version of the Google letters using the free graphics program GIMP. The typeface was changed and an exclamation mark was added, mimicking the Yahoo! logo.




"There were a lot of different color iterations", says Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules."

In 2010, the Google logo received its first major and permanent overhaul since 1999. The new logo was first tested in November 2009, and was officially launched on May 6, 2010.It utilises an identical typeface to the previous logo, but the "o" is distinctly more orange-colored in place of the previously more yellowish "o", as well as a much more subtle shadow rendered in a different shading style.

Ambigram Logos

An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, is a graphical figure that spells out one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation. The text spelled out in the other direction or orientation is often the same, but can also be a different text.

 

Anouk (2009)	Sun Microsystems (1982)	DeLorean Motor Company (1977)	New Man (1969)
Angels & Demons	Blacksmith	Bombay Stock Exchange	GOES
Illuminati