The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) came up with its famous panda logo 50 years ago. According to Max Nicholson, the mastermind behind the charity (then called the World Wildlife Fund) it was “one of the most valuable trademarks that has ever been devised, and it took about twenty minutes”1.

It is natural that conservation organizations should borrow motifs from nature, but the motives that lead to the final designs of their logos are not always obvious. In 1961, as the WWF's founders mulled over the choice of their symbol in a plush town house in London's Belgravia, the most important consideration was that it should reproduce well on the organization's letterhead. With colour printing then out of the question for a fledgling charity, this narrowed the options to a shortlist of black-and-white species, and the popular panda emerged.

Credit: WWF

This mundane explanation is probably also behind several other famously two-toned conservation brands. One was the oryx chosen by Fauna and Flora International (FFI) in 1950 (Fig. 1k), another the avocet first used in print by the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in 1966 (Fig. 1i). With advances in printing technology from the 1950s onwards, more colour — notably greens, frequently blues and sometimes browns — crept into conservation imagery. But monochromatic species continued to be popular. Birdlife International chose an arctic tern in 1991, its simple contrasting lines helping the organization to get noticed in our busy digital world (Fig. 1a).

Figure 1: Changing logos.
figure 1

B: CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL; C: MARINE CONSERVATION SOC.; E: WWT.ORG.UK; F: THE CHASE

a, Birdlife International. b, Conservation International. c, Marine Conservation Society. d, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. e, Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust. f, The Woodland Trust. g, British Trust for Ornithology. h, International Union for the Conservation of Nature. i, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. j, The Nature Conservancy. k, Fauna and Flora International. l, Friends of the Earth International.

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Since 1961, just about every conservation brand has changed — including the WWF's panda. They have evolved in response to shifts in the media landscape, corporate life and conservation practice. This logo evolution, sometimes slow and incremental, sometimes rapid and radical, traces the story of how conservation charities have weathered the past half decade.

Homespun look

It is fair to say that 50 years ago most conservation outfits, including the WWF, were run by a close-knit core of passionate individuals operating on a shoe-string budget. It is no surprise, then, to find that conservation logos from this period were frequently homegrown. One option was to run a competition. This is how, in 1954, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) settled upon its 'flaming artichoke': an unspecified organic growth emerging from a cumbersome acronym (Fig. 1h). An alternative approach was to lean on an artistic friend. The Fauna Preservation Society (the forerunner of the FFI), for example, collared a lifetime member to ink out the black-and-white face of a gemsbok for the cover of the society's new journal. Better still was to call upon ornithological enthusiast, environmentalist and accomplished artist Peter Scott. He produced a sublime gannet for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in the late 1940s (Fig. 1g), and a pair of forward-looking Bewick's swans for another British charity, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (Fig. 1e).

What's striking about these early examples of conservation artwork is that many of the species on show were not in peril, probably because so little was known about population sizes and extinction risk in the mid-twentieth century. This was certainly the case for the giant panda. When the WWF alighted on its emblem in the early 1960s — also drawn by Scott — China's first dedicated census of the species was still more than a decade away. Even if the panda was having a hard time of it, as seems likely, this was not something the WWF chose to emphasize. Instead, they preferred to spin the idea that the panda “owes its survival to the sort of careful conservation which all wild creatures deserve”2.

Soon, however, logos began to portray species that did have a clear conservation message. The dodo, the icon of extinction, was a perfect image for the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, founded in 1963 to support Gerald Durrell's pioneering conservation-focused captive work at Jersey Zoo in the Channel Islands (Fig. 1d). There were also more upbeat emblems. The moving tale of Elsa the lioness (star of Joy Adamson's novel Born Free (Collins and Harvill; 1960) and its 1966 Hollywood adaptation and memorable soundtrack) made her an exemplary face of the Born Free Foundation, established in 1984 to campaign against zoos and promote conservation in the wild. The RSPB's success in recreating the habitat suitable for breeding avocets in Britain during the 1940s made this species an obvious choice as an emblem (in addition to its being monochrome).

The FFI's common gemsbok (Oryx gazella) took on new meaning in the wake of Operation Oryx, a 1962 effort to save the critically endangered Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) in which the FFI played a leading role3. For all but the most nerdy naturalists able to tell their O. gazella from their O. leucoryx, the FFI's logo suddenly became a celebration of a conservation triumph. Several artistic mutations later and the metamorphosis is nearly complete, with the FFI's latest logo (launched in 2010) looking more like the Arabian oryx than the gemsbok. It also has a spray of vegetation thrown in as an acknowledgement of the organization's commitment to flora.

Corporate conservation

It was inevitable that the bigger players should begin to show more corporate swagger.

By the 1980s, the conservation movement had gathered significant momentum. Between 1961 and 1981, for example, the WWF had raised some US$55 million in support of 2,800 conservation and education projects worldwide4. With awareness and funding on the increase and organizations growing from local concerns to national and international affairs with burgeoning overheads, it was inevitable that the bigger players should begin to show more corporate swagger.

Conservation imagery tracked this transition, with organizations turning to advertising agencies (which sometimes donated their time) for input into their public appearance. These interventions have not always been popular, particularly with the old-school membership. In 1986, for example, when the WWF invited Landor Associates of San Francisco to rationalize the several panda variants then in use, the brand consultants were critical of a slightly streamlined incarnation that Scott had approved. Landor judged that its nose was “too soft”, its legs “too bow legged”, its mouth “one-sided” and overall it just looked a bit “old, sick, depressed”5. Scott, it is said, was mortified by the disappearance of his anatomically faithful, playful panda. But the new abstracted panda suggested by Landor was better suited to life in the rich, digital environment that was on the horizon.

Through the stylized output of these advertising agencies, conservation organizations were also able to move quietly away from the narrow species-specific remit that a fine-art logo implied. Counterintuitively, the simpler and more abstract the design, the better able it seemed to communicate the increasingly complex business of conservation.

The case of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which currently manages the Bronx Zoo, several other wildlife attractions in New York and more than 500 projects in over 60 countries, offers one of the most punctuated examples of logo evolution. In 2001, also with assistance from Landor, the WCS dropped its animal brand for an image that reflected the breadth of its twenty-first-century interests: out went a pair of excitable antelopes — its 'leaping lopes' — and in came a dappled green square that could be either a forest canopy or coral reef.

It was during this phase of abstraction that we first got a glimpse of a human element in logos. Conservation International began life in 1987, represented by a rainforest with a hut tucked away beneath the canopy, emphasizing the multi-species complexity of ecosystems (Fig. 1b). Also in the late 1980s, the UK-based Marine Conservation Society ditched a finicky hermit crab in favour of a dolphin and human diving together, a logo that was updated in 2000 (Fig. 1c). In the 1990s, Friends of the Earth (FOE) International came up with an avian squiggle superimposed on a circle that could be either the Sun or a human hand (Fig. 1l). These are some of the earliest graphic acknowledgements of something that all conservation organizations now understand: humans are part of both the problems and the solutions. The BTO's new logo, launched last year, is a recent example of this human dimension to conservation artwork: the head of a generic bird replaced Peter Scott's gannet and doubles as the pupil of a human eye.

If there is one drawback to this shift away from depicting charismatic creatures, it is that an organization is probably less likely to catch the eye of a mass audience for whom animals still have perennial appeal. But this might be a price worth paying if the substitute makes the right impression on the governments, agencies, foundations and corporations that have become a major source of conservation funding.

The IUCN, for example, has never sought a fluffy image. This is partly because that public appeal was provided by the WWF, which was founded to raise funds for the cash-strapped union. It is also because a hefty chunk of the IUCN's revenue is clinched in diplomatic dealings, which might explain why, after the extinction of the 'flaming artichoke', the union was content to spend several decades tinkering with various permutations of its acronym. Finally, in 2008, the IUCN (with advice this time from New York advertising agency Young and Rubicam) settled for a blue ring encircling the organization's initials. “The blue 'C' of the logo represents the planet and the union,” says John Kidd, the IUCN's head of global communications. “The IUCN works on complex issues, often with complex solutions, but the logo is clean, clear, simple and, over time, hopefully memorable.”

Global appeal

With the emergence of a truly global culture, and global concerns such as acid rain, nuclear fallout and climate change, it makes sense that this kind of holistic, planetary design has become more common. Most of the Friends of the Earth network swapped the charity's abstract sun and hand for a bright green, marker-pen circle in 2001. “It is a very simple design, and the idea was to represent the Earth, sustainability, cycles and unity,” says Ann Doherty, communications coordinator at FOE International.

Similarly, in 2007, the international environmental organization the Nature Conservancy wrapped its trademark oak leaves around a green sphere (Fig. 1j). “As we've expanded outside the United States, now to more than 30 countries, we've incorporated the round, globe-like symbol to represent our focus on protecting lands and waters around the world,” says Valerie Dorian, director of brand marketing and strategic partnerships. Even more nationally focused outfits, such as the United Kingdom's Woodland Trust, have adopted circular or spherical designs that give a nod to the scale of the problem (see Fig. 1f).

Many of these trends — the abstraction, a human presence, the appearance of a global element — have come together in Conservation International's new brand. Part of the reason for axing the long-standing rainforest logo was that it did not reproduce well in miniature, a quality essential in today's relentlessly digital world. It also failed to reflect the breadth of the organization's twenty-first-century mission “to empower societies to responsibly and sustainably care for nature for the well-being of humanity”6. In other words, Conservation International is about more than just rainforests.

The logo was the result of a consultation with New York design agency Chermayeff & Geysmar. “What Conservation International needed was not a literal picture that illustrates every single area of their activities, but rather a new, suggestive, and potentially expansive mark,” says Sagi Haviv, the agency's principal designer. His solution — a blue circle underlined in green — is supposed to represent “our blue planet, emphasized, supported and sustained”; it also evokes an abstract human figure into the bargain.

The WWF's symbol is the most obvious exception that proves this trend towards global imagery. The organization never got type-cast in a species specific role; this is probably because the Chinese Cultural Revolution prevented the WWF from becoming involved with pandas until 1980. By then its panda had become established as a symbol with a truly global appeal.

So what should we make of a journey that began with literal, fine-art creations and has reached abstract images that make only a passing reference to nature? The answer, like the logos we're left with, is pretty simple. Conservation is no longer just about a single species on the brink of extinction, the habitat it's found in or some wider ecosystem. Now it's about the future of the planet. That, of course, means it's really all about us.