Logos are essential for brand promotion, and the Star Wars logo is no exception. An effective logo is instantly recognizable, allowing potential customers to know that they’re buying the right product or service.
The Star Wars logo may be basic, but it gets the movie series’s messages across concisely and effectively. In this respect, the logo contains all the qualities of an effective logo.
The Star Wars Emblem Design
The Star Wars logo is a pretty simple design. Although the logo with its 1980s flair and block-style inscription is recognizable to many movie buffs, the original logo didn’t exist when the first movie was released. The first Star Wars movie was released in 1977.
A look at posters and other souvenirs associated with the first movie shows that the logo went through an evolution of sorts. Most versions of the Star Wars logo followed the same script that filmgoers see at the beginning of the movies: letters disappearing into the distance.
The Star Wars logo appears in all the Star Wars movies that came after the original movie was released in 1977. While the logos of the different Star Wars movies have different distances, the circular, smooth lines around the block-style inscription are consistent throughout the movies, with some exceptions.
While the Star Wars emblem might appear reasonably basic, this could be a marketing ploy by the logo and the movies in general. So, it’s fair to say that the Star Wars franchise doesn’t try to be something it’s not.
While the sets, characters, and ideas are original and tempting, the Star Wars characters pass for old family pals that happen to be staying so far away from planet Earth (and technically passed away eons ago). The Star Wars creator does a fine job of making the movies both something familiar and something different, a trick that’s even seen in the movies’ logo.
The Star Wars Logo Evolution
As earlier mentioned, there was no Star Wars logo when the first movie came out in 1977. Advertisements, posters, and other souvenirs at times reveal subtle differences in the logo’s basic theme.
The logo’s letters are largely in block-style, but the inscription Star Wars sometimes appears in plain, jarring text, minus the smooth, circular lines seen in the Star Wars movie titles. This may be a sign of the movie producers trying to work out what the whole franchise is about.
What does that mean? We are in the era of branding, and every brand requires a logo. By streamlining the Star Wars emblem into something with block letters, even lines, and a somewhat upbeat modern flair, the franchise founder didn’t make Star Wars stand out as a gripping horror movie but the kind of lighthearted movie that the entire family could enjoy.
All the movies that followed the first Star Wars movie had logo versions different from the first movie. Some logos feature thinner writing, but the smooth, curved style has been ever-present throughout all the series’s movies.
However, this doesn’t mean that the logo hasn’t changed at all. The producers of various Star Wars movies have stuck with the simple design, often just changing the letters’ thickness and colors. One lesson that branding experts can take from this: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!
1976
In 1976, Ralph McQuarrie designed the Star Wars logo featuring a black inscription against a white background. The Star Wars font is bespoke sans serif font with even lines, with some inclined to the middle. The logo looked modern and elegant, though too elegant and soft for the series’s mood and plot.
1977
In 1977, today’s Star Wars logo was redesigned, and it has stayed the same ever since. The white sans serif inscription in broad, smooth lines got a black outline, and the tails of both the “R” and “S” were stretched to the sides. The logo was futuristic and became instantly recognizable. Today, you can’t see any of the Star Wars producers without this monochrome inscription.
1977-Present
In 1977, today’s Star Wars logo was redesigned, and it has stayed the same ever since. The white sans serif inscription in broad, smooth lines got a black outline, and the tails of both the “R” and “S” were stretched to the sides. The logo was futuristic and became instantly recognizable. Today, you can’t see any of the Star Wars producers without this monochrome inscription.
The Star Wars Emblem Design Elements
Shape and font: The Logo Star Wars was drawn from scratch purposely for the project, so it didn’t use an existing font. What catches one’s eye is perhaps how the letter S merges flawlessly with T at the top left and R and S merge seamlessly at the bottom left.
From 1998 to 1999, Italian logo designer Davide Canavero, aka Boba Fonts, came up with a whole group of fonts inspired by Star Wars. Apart from the letters derived from the inscription unchanged, Canavero created a full font in the same look and christened it Star Jedi. Therefore, that’s the most commonly used Star Wars typeface since it’s the closest thing to the original. Also, there are various other variations in the group, with each being an adaptation of the original.
For example, Star Jedi Outline’s font consists of letters with a thin framework, while the font named Star Jedi Logo features double or single lines of text. In this group, you’ll also find the Star Jedi Special Edition font, which is modeled around the font seen on the Special Edition Star Wars Trilogy logo.
Apart from the Star Jedi group of fonts, you can also come across fonts inspired by the Star Wars movie series. For example, there’s the Death Star font, which was designed by someone nicknamed Sharkshock. This font has close kerning and is ideally displayed in large sizes.
Color: The Star Wars emblem is black and yellow. Yellow symbolizes imagination, passion, and depth, while black symbolizes the franchise’s dominance, charisma, and stylishness.
The History of Star Wars
Made by George Lucas, Star Wars is a space opera movie series that has become one of the most influential and successful franchises in movie history. Started in 1977 and revived in the early 2000s, the Star Wars movie series continuously improved the field of special effects and morphed into a hugely lucrative merchandising industry.
By 1973, George Lucas was a hugely successful director and writer at American Graffiti. This didn’t go unnoticed by 20th Century Fox, who backed him up with $9.5 million to produce the original Stars Wars movie. Directed by Lucas, the movie took four years to produce, with parts shot in Death Valley, California, and England, and Tunisia.
When the first Star Wars was released in May 1977, it was a runaway success. It was later renamed Star Wars: Episode 4—A New Hope. A space thriller set in “a galaxy very far away eons ago,” the movie is centered around Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), a young guy caught in the middle of interplanetary warfare between rebel forces and an authoritarian empire.
Skywalker and the devious smuggler Han Solo (played by Harrison Ford) are commissioned to rescue Princess Leia from detention on a gigantic space station under the ominous Darth Vader’s command, whose booming, the mechanically-enhanced voice became instantly iconic.
The Jedi Knights, comprising a bunch of either kind or evil warriors, are at the heart of the movie and the franchise it spawned. The Jedi Knights harness and control the Force, an omnipresent spiritual substance that balances good and bad power—and Skywalker’s mission to enter the ranks.
Although Star Wars opened in just 42 theaters at first, the movie earned roughly $3 million within the first week and by the close of the summer had grossed $100 million. The movie won 6 Academy Awards as well as a special achievement honor for feats in sound. It also revolutionized the movie industry with its innovations in special effects.
Industry Light & Magic (ILM), a special effects company owned by George Lucas, designed a string of mechanic “droids” and ingenious alien creatures that populated various exotic locations. One of the most impressive aspects of this movie was the sophisticated space fights done with mounted miniatures.
The Star Wars franchise continued to make significant advancements in the special effects field well into the 2000s. Industry & Light Magic became a leading special effects studio used by Hollywood. Lucas released two sequels of the original Star Wars movie in 1980 and 1983. The first one was Star Wars: Episode 5—The Empire Strikes Back, while the second was Star Wars: Episode 6—Return of the Jedi. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, thanks to an extensive merchandise line, release of videos, and the series’s re-release in theaters in 1997.
Over 20 years since the movie was first released, Lucas started releasing a second movie series describing the events that occurred before those seen in the first series. Lucas resumed the director role (he’d directed the original movie only) and used new young actors such as Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor and the latest innovations in digital video equipment.
Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars: Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith were all box-office hits released in 1999, 2002, and 2005, respectively. However, they weren’t as critically acclaimed as the first series.
The Star Wars series, however, remained very lucrative well into the 2000s. It boasted action figures, multiple large book series, clothing, and the animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars released in 2008, which described events taking place between the second and third episode, and many successful video game titles created by LucasArts, another of George Lucas’s companies.
In 2005, the Star Wars series’s sixth movie was released, almost 30 years since the series started. By that time, the whole franchise was thought to have brought in at least $20 billion, a feat that’s so far unparalleled in the movie industry.
In 2015, a seventh movie was released. It was named Star Wars: Episode 7—The Force Awakens. It was the first movie in the series produced by Walt Disney, which had acquired Lucasfilms LLC in 2012. The movie expounded on the stories of favorites like Princess Leia and Han Solo and gave Star Wars mythos new characters.
In 2017, Episode 8: The Last Jedi continued the saga by reintroducing Skywalker. The last installment in the nine-movie series, Star Wars: Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker (also known as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), concluded the Star Wars franchise started with the original Star Wars movie. Another series known as A Star Wars Story was made up of stand-alone movies and included Rogue One in 2016 and Solo in 2018.
In a nutshell, Star Wars is one unified, familiar, vast, and amazingly well-executed narrative that arose from the imagination of one moviemaker. It’s currently worth billions, powers industries, and has grown into a seemingly permanent global culture aspect. The movie series is overwhelmingly silly but also weirdly profound—a great, nostalgic romance filled with love and wisdom that three generations associate intimately with childhood, adventure, as well as the meaning of good and bad.
Final Thoughts on Star Wars Logo and History
It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood movie without the Star Wars Logo and series. These movies have made a significant cultural impact, not to mention the effect the series has had on moviemaking itself. Star Wars catapulted science fiction movies into the mainstream, taking them away from a niche movie industry.
Today’s movies are full of the science fiction features introduced by Star Wars, as the design of weapons and spaceships, and even set and character design.
By 2018, it was reported that the Star Wars franchise was worth approximately $25 billion.
