Did Verisign Steal Axis Bank’s Logo?

In 2010, Verisign sold its authentication business unit to Symantec (the makers of the Norton Anti-Virus suite) for $1.28 billion. Verisign manages two of the world’s 13 Internet root servers.

Shortly after the deal was made, Verisign introduced a new “V” logo.

Verisign's Old and New Logo

What I can’t believe is that it looks like a complete rip-off of Axis Bank‘s logo; just flipped vertically.

Axis Bank Logo

The Axis Bank logo was introduced in the year 2007 after the bank, one of India’s largest private sector lender, announced that it would be changing its name from UTI Bank and that it would be exercising a complete re-branding of the bank.

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Comments

  1. I don’t know, the effect is not extremely groundbreaking, though they are very similar. Logos are designed by individuals and ultimately approved by groups, so who knows if the individual designer had seen something nobody in the approval process had. It would be hard for Axis bank to say “you stole our logo” on this one.

  2. Disagree with Picus on this. The design is identical, except for rotation. Axis could make their case pretty easily.

    That said, I suspect this is just an accident rather than overt theft. The design is so simple it’s not surprising more than one company ended up using it. For that matter, you could say both companies “stole” their design from AOL’s:

    .. or the ministry of design:

    Or, as previously noted, from Mitsubishi:

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