Some early history of the Wi-Fi logo

In 1999, the six founding companies of the Wi-Fi Alliance (Symbol, 3Com, Harris, Lucent, Nokia, and Aironet) hired the branding firm InterBrand to develop a consumer-friendly name to replace the ugly mouthful “IEEE 802.11b High Rate Wireless Local Area Network”. After proposing various name possibilities, the name Wi-Fi was ultimately decided upon — and the next task for InterBrand was to come up with a graphic logo for the new name.

Again, various alternatives were proposed — with a presentation slide displayed to the group showing some possible choices. One of InterBrand’s ideas had the dots on the “i” in Wi and in Fi depicted as transmitting radio antennas. Another incorporated the number 11 to reflect 802.11 running at 11 megabits per second. But the winning choice was the simple white letters on black spelling Wi with the black letters on white spelling Fi.

This logo came to be affectionately called the “yin-yang”. In August 1999, InterBrand did some tweaks on this concept, coming up with the final result that was used at the public launch of Wi-Fi in Atlanta on September 15, 1999.

Read more about the history of Wi-Fi in Beyond Everywhere.