Why Is the Garmin Logo a Triangle? (It's Not What You Think)

Day 106: Why Is the Garmin Logo a Triangle?

The obvious guess is GPS triangulation — satellites, triangles, it fits. It's wrong, on two separate counts.

The triangle is newer than you think

For Garmin's first seventeen years, the logo wasn't a triangle at all — it was a small globe, rendered in black and white with a striped pattern across the continents and oceans. The triangle didn't appear until the company's 2006 rebrand, when the globe was dropped for the cleaner, more minimalistic mark used today: the wordmark with a small triangle set above the last letter.

GPS doesn't use triangulation

Here's the part that surprises most people: GPS doesn't use triangulation at all. It uses trilateration.

Triangulation measures angles between points. Trilateration measures distances. Your watch times how long each satellite's signal takes to reach it, converts that delay into a distance, and draws a sphere with that radius around each satellite. Where enough of those spheres overlap — that's your position.

No angles, no triangles. Just overlapping circles (or spheres, in three dimensions) intersecting at one point: you.

So what does the triangle actually mean?

According to Garmin's own brand language from the 2006 redesign, the triangle isn't a GPS reference at all — it's meant to read as an arrow pointing up: growth, progress, forward motion. Reliable, minimalistic, and, apparently, nothing to do with how the technology actually works.