Linkin Park Logo
Being one of the most popular and celebrated rock bands of the 90s and early 2000s, Linkin Park has had almost unparalleled influence on the genre. They’ve been performing non-stop until the untimely death of the band’s lead, Chester Bennington in 2017.
Meaning and History
Linkin Park wasn’t called that the first several years of their career. Since the inception in 1996 and until 1999 they were called Xero, then Hybrid Theory. The iconic name was only adopted in 2000. Famously, Linkin Park is just a distorted version of ‘Lincoln Park’. But why they chose that as an inspiration is not clear.
1997 – 1999
One year after the creation of the band, they introduced their first logo. Back in the day, it was Xero, and the logo was styled as a combination of half-written Latin letters. There were mostly designed in Gothic serif, but the letter ‘E’ resembled one of the Greek letters than anything.
1999 – 2000
In the time period when the band was called Hybrid Theory, they used this logo. By all accounts, it was just a combination of strokes and lines meant to inspire the sense of being a hybrid, and that’s all.
2000 – 2002
The 2002 design was the first to feature the LP’s final name. They styled it to look as if in mist, with lower parts of the letters being shrouded in something grey. Otherwise, they were completely black with some effects for lighting and so forth. Additionally, the letters ‘N’ were reversed to resemble a Russian ‘И’, just for style.
They also put the camera capture frames along the corners of the logo.
2002 – 2003
The 2002 improvement saw the addition of more saturation to the color black. The mist effect was largely gone, as were the rest of special effects all over the logo.
2003 – 2007
Even more saturation was added in 2003, which saw the removal of all traces of the ‘mist’. Additionally, they also changed the look of the braces frames on the corners, making them larger and elongated.
2007 – 2010
2007 saw them introduce a new look. The words were now stacked one over the other, and the letters returned to their normal positions. That being said, they also became noticeably thicker and bolder, with little room between them. A lot of them were also designed with aggressive appendages all over them.
2010 – 2017
The 2010 design, by contrast, looks a lot more like the previous one-level designs. This one, however, doesn’t have any corner frames and unusual letter positions. The letters themselves are cleaner and taller than their predecessors. By all accounts, this logo is the plainest of them all.
2017 – today
After Chester died, they decided to make the logo more somber and less expressive. They basically took the 2010 design, made the letters shorter, and removed much of the boldness, thus making them way thinner and grayer. They also added a lot more interval between them.
Emblem and Symbol
The usual Linkin Park emblem is a circular shape with a complex triangular symbol inside. If you look just a bit closer, it’s supposed to be letters ‘L’ and ‘P’ intertwined into one shape. They use this emblem fairly often – especially where there was no room for the whole official logo
