The SAP logo has been tweaked several times throughout its more than 45-year history. However, the overall look of the emblem has not changed much as its center has always been the three-letter wordmark.
SAP made its first steps in 1972, starting with one customer and less than ten employees. Today, it has more than 340,000 customers in over 180 countries.
The early versions of the emblem featured just the name of the company in a square shape.
The company’s logo created in 1972 looks a lot like the logo everyone knows today. A blue and white striped square has white, sans-serif characters forming the company’s name. It is accompanied by a rectangle placed right next to it on the right. The rectangle also has a striped pattern with lines going from the upper right corner to the bottom left. It was quite an interesting emblem that was hard to explain. Nonetheless, the design proved to be successful as the company made only minimal changes to it.
The company changed the striped background to a solid dark blue color. This allowed the initials to stand out much better.
This update introduced the smiling “A”. Many might not even remember the earlier version as the initials printed using this version of the “A” are instantly associated with the SAP software company. Besides changing the “A”, the designers stretched out the name vertically.
It was only in 1999 that the triangle was added to the emblem. Over the following couple of years, the company experimented with the colors, mostly shades of blue. One more remarkable change was the introduction of a “smiling” “A”.
In 2011 the company adopted the version of the logo with a light blue background. It was a gradient with a darker shade at the bottom that got lighter toward the top. The initials were kept unchanged.
One day in late October 2014, visitors to the company’s official web resource noticed a remarkable change. The iconic blue logo went gold. The sunny, optimistic color created a perfect harmony with the smiling “A”. But that was not all. Gone were the familiar square and triangle shapes. In fact, this version of the logo was a plain gold wordmark given against the white background. Alternatively, the logo could be reversed. In this case, the background was gold, while the letters themselves were white. The reversed version was placed into a square shape.
Although the gold version created a friendly and optimistic impression, the company got rid of it very soon. Instead, it returned to the standard, instantly recognizable version of the logo, where the white letters were placed inside a blue shape formed by a square and a triangle.
In 2011 the company adopted the version of the logo with the light blue background.
One day in late October 2014, visitors of the company’s official web resource noticed a remarkable change. The iconic blue logo went gold. The sunny, optimistic color created a perfect harmony with the smiling “A”. But that was not all. Gone were the familiar square and triangle shapes. In fact, this version of the logo was a plain gold wordmark given against the white background. Alternatively, the logo could be reversed. In this case, the background was gold, while the letters themselves were white. The reversed version was placed into a square shape.
Although the gold version created a friendly and optimistic impression, the company got rid of it very soon. Instead, it returned to the standard, instantly recognizable version of the logo, where the white letters were placed inside a blue shape formed by a square and a triangle.
The sans-serif all-cap type featured in the SAP logo can be easily recognized by the distinctive “A” character.
Blue is very often associated with mental activity, information, and software engineering. So, it is hardly a surprise that the software corporation used this color in its wordmark.