Columbia Sportswear	Sun Microsystems
European Space Agency (ESA)	Etos
Luba Group	Barcelona ’92

It is striking to see how much some logos look alike, not to say are identical. You could wonder; are these logos designed independently not knowing of its twin counterpart existence or are they just bold copies. Sure there are many copycats around when it comes to logo design. Most times this kind of copying is limited to certain elements of a logo: say a swoosh, sphere or crown element. Not that often you come around logos that really show more than two to three elements in common; for instance color, figure representation, number of elements and style (e.g. the Luba Group logo and the Barcelona ’92 Olympics logo) or logos that are a copy of the complete concept (f.i. the total pointsymmetric ambigram concept of the Sun Microsystems logo and the Columbia Sportswear logo).

I always thought the more-than-just-an-element-copying was not really something the logos of big multinational companies were or could be based upon. Sure small companies get big and sometimes you just don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the globe. But, since I got some element tagging up and running on goodlogo!com, I was really surprised to see how many (well not that many, but quite a few though) logos look alike.

The most obvious cousins, or should I say twins, I put next to this post. Some other less striking logo similarities I put below in some element links to the tagging section on goodlogo!com:

• Diamond + Pointsymmetric (Columbia and Sun)
• Circle + Waves (Vattenfall and Obama ’08)
• Circle + Dot + E (Etos and ESA)
• Circle + Pepsiblue + Red (Pepsi and Korean Air)
• Pepsiblue + Person + Red + Yellow (Luba Group and Barcelona ’92)
• Elements + Multicolor (Several ‘Distant Cousins’)
• N + Nesbean (Close ‘Cousins’)

I am very curious if anybody knows more examples of close cousins or even better twins!
Also if you have any info on which of the twins was first, trivia or other stuff, please post it below.