Nvidia’s quirky logo reveals just how much the company has changed

This month, Nvidia did what might have seemed unthinkable just two years ago: It dethroned Apple as the second-most valuable company in the world. Apple has since knocked it back down a peg, but the chipmaker’s stock price has grown more than 200% in the past year. It has come to represent a bet on the future of artificial intelligence, since it makes the chips needed to supply the industry’s ravenous hunger for computing power. And yet the logo of Nvidia, which was founded in 1993, remains decidedly stuck in time—and reveals just how much the company has changed over the years.



Although Nvidia has been around since the ‘90s, it had remained relatively obscure for years, known mostly to serious gamers and tech insiders. It’s rare these days to find a big company with a logo like Nvidia’s. Consisting of a somewhat wonky variable-width green spiral approximating an eye, it features an overlaid green square in which the spiral is reversed out, resulting in a starkly contrasting pattern that produces a somewhat unsettling vibration effect reminiscent of Op Art . It’s certainly an anomaly in the world of tech giants, where logos tend to communicate notions of control, evenness, and regularity (although the swirling vortex logos of many of today’s AI firms share a certain uncanny creepiness with Nvidia’s spinning oculus).



1993-2006 [Image: Nvidia]



While the Nvidia logo may appear unconventional today, at its 1993 inception, it fit the times as well as Saved By the Bell and Seattle grunge bands. In the mid-’90s , there was a bumper crop of trademarks with these contrasting overlay or split elements, including quite a few featuring eyes. And the Nvidia spiral eyeball certainly seems to be a cousin of the 1990 Time Warner “Eye/Ear” logo , which was then quite a prominent design.



The Nvidia name itself was a D.I.Y. job by company founder Jensen Huang , evolving from the placeholder “NV” (for “next version”) to an alternate spelling of the Latin “invidia,” meaning “envy.” The name was rationalized by the company’s aspiration to make jealousy-inducing products, and it must have helped that it sounded sort of like “video” to boot.



Vintage logos with the Opt Art aesthetic. Top row (from left to right): Uncommon Sense Consulting, Schwartz Photography, Montana Street Cafe, Columbus Chamber of Commerce. Middle row: Greater Columbus Arts Council, Thom and Dave Marketing Design, Solano Family Physicians, Optic Nerve USA. Bottom row: Poudre Valley Hospital, Tom Fowler, International Environmental Film Festival, Arizona Heritage Alliance. [Images: United States Patent and Trademark Office/ Print’s Best Logos & Symbols Volume 3 (1994 ) and Volume 4 (1996) /courtesy of the author’s collection]



There were no branding consultants around to take potshots at the name (“Do you know what ‘invidious’ means?”) or the logo (“Are you familiar with Shakespeare’s ‘green-eyed monster’ ?”), and Nvidia was off and running. In those early years, the company’s branding fit its vibe as the powerful engine under the hood of the coolest video games of the day.



But logo trends can die fast. By 1998, the overlay logo design elements were long gone, and Time Warner had dumped its three-year-old “Eye/Ear” for being “too strong,” perhaps a polite way of saying “too weird.” And as the years passed, Nvidia started to move away from gaming to focus on more serious computing applications. 



2006-Present [Image: Nvidia]



Many companies adopt more mature, sensible, and professionally-crafted branding as they grow. Apple ditched its amateurish Isaac Newton trademark and then its jazzy rainbow stripes and Microsoft went through its disco, Metallica, and Blibbet eras before both settled into more sober emblems. But while Nvidia’s 2006 brand refresh fiddled with the logo’s colors and tweaked its typography, the mark remained relatively unchanged. 



Eighteen years later, Nvidia has emerged as the arsenal of the AI revolution, supplying chips to fellow tech behemoths from Alphabet to Meta to Tesla , all stamped with that same swirly eyeball.



Today, the company has around three trillion reasons to keep its oddball logo, not to mention the fact that it’s now tattooed on Huang’s arm. Nvidia has expanded to unbelievable dimensions. And whether a ’90s comeback returns it to style or it simply remains a sort of graphic design time capsule, the logo will continue to symbolize one of the world’s most important companies. Still, you could argue Nvidia has the Peter Pan of logos: It never grew up.