Honestly, if you were around in the early 90s, you remember the chaos. One day, the guy who gave us Purple Rain just... stopped having a name. He wasn't Prince anymore. He was a shape. Specifically, the artist formerly known as prince symbol—a weird, curvy, unpronounceable glyph that looked like a cross between a chemistry experiment and a secret society crest.
It was bold. It was annoying to typists. It was also a genius act of war.
You’ve probably seen the symbol everywhere since then—on gold necklaces, stage floors, and even as the shape of a custom purple guitar. But back in 1993, people thought he’d finally lost his mind. They called him "The Artist" or "The Guy with the Thing." Most people didn't realize that the move was less about being an eccentric rock star and more about a brutal, multi-million dollar legal knife fight with Warner Bros. Records.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Name Change
There is a huge misconception that Prince changed his name to a symbol because he was just "being weird." That’s not it. Basically, Prince felt like a prisoner of his own success. He had signed a massive contract with Warner Bros., but the label wanted him to slow down. They didn't want him flooding the market with new music every five minutes. Prince, on the other hand, was a literal faucet of creativity. He had vaults full of unreleased songs and wanted to drop albums whenever he felt like it.
He realized something terrifying: Warner Bros. owned the name "Prince" for marketing purposes. So, he killed the name.
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"Prince is the name that my mother gave me at birth," he famously told the press. "Warner Bros. took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music that I wrote." By becoming the artist formerly known as prince symbol, he was trying to render his contract obsolete. If there was no "Prince," how could "Prince" be forced to follow the rules?
He even started performing with the word SLAVE written across his cheek. It wasn't subtle. It was a middle finger to the industry that he felt was commodifying his soul.
The Secret Geometry of the Love Symbol
The glyph itself isn't just a random doodle. It has a name: Love Symbol #2.
Prince didn't just wake up and draw it on a napkin (though that makes for a better story). He actually collaborated with designers Mitch Monson and Lizz Luce to refine the shape. It’s a mashup of the traditional astrological symbols for Mars (male) and Venus (female). By blending them, Prince was leaning into the androgyny that had defined his career since the Dirty Mind days.
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Breaking Down the Design
- The Circle: Represents the sun and the earth, the encompassing forces of life.
- The Cross: A nod to his deep, often complicated Christian faith.
- The "7" Shape: Look closely at the central stem. There’s a reversed segment of the number seven tucked in there. Seven was Prince’s sacred number—it’s the title of one of his biggest hits and, coincidentally, his birthday is June 7.
- The Spiral: Derived from the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol for protection and health.
The symbol was intentionally "imperfect." Monson has mentioned in interviews that the curves aren't perfectly symmetrical because Prince wanted it to reflect the human body—flaws and all. It wasn't meant to be a corporate logo; it was meant to be a living identity.
The Floppy Disk Logistics
Here’s a detail that usually gets left out of the history books: the tech headache.
In 1993, you couldn't just "Google" a symbol. There were no emojis. If a journalist wanted to write about him, they literally didn't have the character on their keyboard. Warner Bros., trying to keep their star relevant despite the feud, had to mail out hundreds of 3.5-inch floppy disks to newsrooms. These disks contained a custom font file. To "type" the artist formerly known as prince symbol, you had to install the font and hit a specific key.
If you didn't have the disk? You were stuck writing out "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince," which is exactly how that long-winded nickname was born. It was the only way to describe him without drawing a picture in the middle of a sentence.
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Why the Symbol Still Matters Today
Prince eventually went back to his birth name in 2000 once his contract expired. But the symbol never left. It became the ultimate "Nike Swoosh" of the music world. Think about the 2007 Super Bowl Halftime Show—widely considered the best ever. He played "Purple Rain" in a literal downpour on a stage shaped like the symbol, holding a guitar shaped like the symbol.
It represents more than just music. It’s a blueprint for artist's rights. Every time you see a modern artist like Taylor Swift re-recording her albums to own her masters, you’re seeing the DNA of Prince’s 90s rebellion. He was the first to realize that if you don't own your name, you don't own yourself.
How to Use the Symbol Today
Even though we have thousands of emojis now, the Love Symbol still isn't a standard Unicode character. You won't find it between the "Smiley Face" and the "Eggplant."
- Digital Use: Most fans use the ASCII approximation
O(+>which is... fine, but a bit clunky. - Official Font: You can still find the "Prince" TrueType font files online if you want to use the actual glyph in Word or Photoshop.
- The Color: In 2017, the Prince Estate and Pantone officially released Love Symbol #2, a specific shade of purple (Pantone 18-3838) to keep the legacy alive.
If you’re looking to dive deeper into this era, your best bet is to listen to The Love Symbol Album (1992). It’s the bridge between Prince the Man and Prince the Glyph. It’s funky, it’s weird, and it contains "7," which basically explains his entire spiritual worldview in five minutes.
The artist formerly known as prince symbol wasn't a marketing gimmick. It was a declaration of independence. It proved that you can take a man's name, but you can't take his identity—especially if that identity is too big for the alphabet anyway.