Ghostface Chillah

The Snapchat ghost first appeared in 2011 as the app icon, a white silhouette with two notches suggesting ears against that unmissable yellow. Snap eventually gave it a name, Ghostface Chillah, a play on the Wu-Tang Clan member, though the company rarely uses it outside trademark filings and the odd interview. The ghost's entire job is to be findable at a glance on a home screen holding a hundred other icons, and it has done that well enough to survive more than a decade of redesigns essentially unchanged, which is the real trick. When Snap went public in 2017 the ghost got the full IPO treatment, splashed across the New York Stock Exchange facade. It also became a physical object: the Snapbot vending machines that dispensed Spectacles were giant yellow ghosts you could walk up to.