I'm sure imagination has its limits. Any great creative idea might have already been had some time before. After all, they say that nothing is original. They also say that great minds think alike. Which seems to suggest that when it comes to great creative ideas, someone else has likely had that thought before, and whatever is being done today is either inspired, shamelessly copied, or has been duplicated via a "parallel" thinking process. This might be the case for the following famous modern logos that have striking similarities to much older designs.

Old Designs Reused?

The above design comparisons are for famous, modern day companies. Medium, a publishing website founded by one of the creators of Twitter. AirBnB, a website and service for finding lodging for travellers. Flipboard, a social network feed app that collects links and social network information and combines it into a handy, magazine like format. And of course Beats by Dr Dre, one of the most popular brands of headphones available today. Then on the left in black and white are logo designs from the 1970's and 80's sourced from 1989 book on logo design.

Eerily similar are they not? To be fair, the designs for Medium and Beats are fairly innocuous. It's a simple 3D M shape, as well as simple lower case b. It's not to hard to imagine that you could create the designs independently of the original designs. The Frisol/Flipboard design are very very similar, but Frisol's flat colour design and sectioned square shapes contrast with flipboard's F shape that isn't sectioned and is 3 shades of colour. As for Airbnb? I got nothing. They're damned similar and a very unique shape to begin with. Maybe they're onto something with "great minds think alike." Or maybe they're right when they say that nothing is original.

Originally seen on: http://www.core77.com/posts/52513/Modern-Day-Logos-That-Look-Awfully-Similar-to-Older-Logos-From-Different-Companies