Asics Logo

ASICS has an unusual identity history for a sportswear company: its wordmark and its emblem were created fifteen years apart, by different designers, and the two elements are still used together. The corporate mark has changed far less often than the product range, which makes the few documented revisions worth tracing properly.

Asics Logo PNG

From Onitsuka to ASICS

The business began as Onitsuka Co., Ltd., founded on 1 September 1949 by Kihachiro Onitsuka in Kobe, making basketball shoes. The Onitsuka Tiger name came from an early model whose suction-cup-like outsole grip was likened to an octopus tentacle. In July 1977 Onitsuka merged with sportswear maker GTO Co., Ltd. and knitwear maker JELENK Co., Ltd. to form ASICS Corporation, with Onitsuka as president, as ASICS’s own product history records. The new name was an acronym of the Latin phrase “Anima Sana In Corpore Sano,” a sound mind in a sound body; the company notes that the better-known “Mens sana” wording was adapted to “Anima.”

The shoe’s tiger-stripe marking is a separate asset from the corporate logo. ASICS dates the stripe design to 1966, and it has remained a product signature rather than part of the wordmark. A fuller overview of the company sits on our ASICS brand page.

The 1977 wordmark

The logotype introduced with the merger was designed by Herb Lubalin with Alan Peckolick, commissioned through the Japanese studio PAOS, which won an invited competition for the job. According to Logo Histories, PAOS submitted six proposals and Lubalin’s studio produced 17 initial concepts, while one Korean design-history account puts the figure at 12 sketches. Two finalists were refined into the finished logotype, with solid, knockout, outlined and lined variants. A large stylized “A” accompanied the wordmark, and design commentary has read that letter as a running track or a thrower in motion, an interpretation offered by Wave rather than documented brand intent.

What survives from 1977 is the template the brand still uses: a lowercase, forward-slanting sans-serif wordmark with a distinctive lowercase first letter. The individual letterforms are custom, not a licensed text face, and the mark was built to work as a compact horizontal lockup beside a separate graphic element.

The 1992 spiral symbol

The spiral “a” that now sits to the left of the wordmark is a much later addition than the lettering. A JAGDA Who’s Who portfolio entry records the ASICS symbol mark for ASICS Corporation with a date of 1992, crediting symbol design to Atsushi Takahashi and art direction to Masashi Uehara. A 1993 Los Angeles Times item quoting an ASICS press release attributes the work to Japan Design Center and states that the spiral represents “the vast spiral galaxies of space, symbolizing the limitless potential of corporate Asics.” Sources indicate the symbol first appeared on the Japanese-only BEZA sportswear line before being applied company-wide.

Surviving artwork from this period is often labelled 1991, but the documented year for the symbol’s introduction is 1992.

The 2007 refresh

The version in use now, with a darker blue and a bolder, more strongly italic typeface, rolled out on 1 January 2007 after a preview on ASICS’s Japanese site in December 2005. Layout archives record the colour change as Pantone 2758C (CMYK 100/80/0/30), and design-press accounts of the logo’s history place the rollout on that January date. This is why the widely repeated claim that the identity dates from 2003 is best treated as a confusion with Onitsuka Tiger’s 2002 relaunch and the 2003 opening of the brand’s first directly managed Tokyo store, which are sub-brand events rather than a corporate wordmark change.

Later marks: ASICS Tiger and the 2017 brand refresh

The ASICS Tiger sub-brand, which revived the older lettering, launched around 2015 with credit to Alan Peckolick, and an update the following year added the word “TIGER” to that mark. In 2017 the company refreshed its wider brand image with Canadian studio Bruce Mau Design and the consultancy Kontrapunkt, introducing a bespoke typeface and a set of additional colours. According to Branding in Labs, that project explicitly left the existing logo, typeface and colour unchanged, making it a brand-system update rather than a logo redesign.

Font and colour

The wordmark is a custom lowercase sans-serif set on a forward slant, paired with a spiral emblem derived from a lowercase “a.” The palette is blue, and it darkened noticeably in the 2007 refresh. Exact slant angles are not documented, and no authoritative source confirms that the lettering matches a named commercial typeface. Hexadecimal colour values circulate in logo directories without supporting documentation; the better-attested colour reference is the Pantone 2758C recorded for the 2007 update.