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I’m sure that if I talk about Rolls-Royce, Mastercard or Citibank, you will all know these brands. But do you know which design studio is behind all these famous brand identities and logos? Let’s discover it together.
If I say Pentagram you will maybe think of a star with five branches, but Pentagram is actually a design studio created in London in 1972. The name was chosen referring to the five founders of the company. Pentagram is the world’s largest independently owned design studio. The company does work in graphic design, identity, architecture, interiors and products and has a large diversity of clients in very different fields such as banking & Finance, Arts & Culture, Architecture and many others.
There are many different types of design, but which part of this industry does Pentagram belong to? We already said that Pentagram designed logos from big brands. In this case we can say that the branch of design Pentagram works in the graphic design. Indeed, Graphic design is a process of visual communication that uses typography, photography and illustration. This particular design is present in almost everything you can see in your everyday life, such as road signs or album covers etc. It can also aim to sell a product using logos and packaging. The application of this type of design to create logos and branding is called corporate design.
Let’s talk about Mastercard as an example of an application of corporate design. Indeed, the company worked together with Mastercard to “refresh” the 2006 version that was meant to separate Mastercard Corporate from the consumer-facing image. Mastercard brand identity is “to emphasize simplicity, connectivity and seamlessness”. Therefore, Pentagram kept the two interlocking circles that make Mastercard recognisable. The major difference is that the colours were designed to appear bright and glowing on different backgrounds. Another change are the police and the “c” that was lowercased in the wordmark.
Taking all this in consideration, I think that we can all agree that Pentagram belongs to the category of the graphic design. Even if they also have activities in other fields such as architecture or editorial design, their main activity consist in helping brands to build their identity and design (or re-design) their logo for them.
Making sense of art and design industries 