“This only really works if there’s been some kind of time lapse – you can’t have nostalgia for something that occurred last week,” says Shields. And it comes with its own problems.

The Royal Mail’s transition to Cosignia was supposed to signal a radical shakeup of the entire business. The company’s chief executive at the time, John Roberts, had grand plans to expand overseas and wanted them to be seen as more than just a company that delivers post.

If they had successfully rebranded, it may have freshened their image and revitalised the company.

But nostalgic logos can only be tweaked very subtly, with caution and care. “If you make it too different, the public feel it’s no longer their brand and they get upset,” says Shields.

Finally, a large part of the longevity of any design is luck. As any designer will tell you, the factor that ultimately determines how long a logo will last is the reputation of the company.

“Logos are really like empty vessels into which you pour meaning,” says Bierut. “You can make a more suitable vessel to hold it – without any holes, or a shape that’s appropriate for what it will hold, but in the end the meaning is the thing that gets applied to it over time.”

Bierut gives the example of the Enron logo, which was another of Rand’s creations. It’s a perfectly functional logo and obeys all the laws of good graphic design; it’s simple and mostly blue, which is seen in the industry as a “safe” colour for all occasions.

And yet, the emblem couldn’t save the company when it was enveloped by scandal in 2001, before going bankrupt. No matter what they look like, all logos are at the mercy of the company they’re affiliated with; they die with their masters.

At the opposite end of the scale, the insignia of a successful company may become one of the most widely reproduced symbols on the planet.

Like the Bass triangle in the 19th Century, Bierut estimates that the Mastercard logo – one of the designs his agency has created – has been reproduced billions of times: on shop windows, bank cards, tills, cash machines, apps and on the internet.

“I like to think that eventually someone will be digging on planet earth in the distant future and they’ll find something with that symbol on it,” he says. Now that’s longevity.

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