GF Smith Rebrand

The brief

GF Smith undertook their last major branding project in 2014. Since then, the business, creative sector and wider world have changed significantly. GF Smith needed a rebrand to both reflect these shifts and take them into the future.

A rebrand that would cut through the noise, connect with creatives everywhere including the next generation, support the company’s growing international reach and ambition all the while embodying the character, community, colour and creativity at GF Smith’s core.

Working closely with the GF Smith team at all levels of the business, we led the rebrand process, holding ‘open forums’ where the whole business could attend and hosting regular workshops taking as many people on the journey as possible.

We created a versatile, multi-platform branding system that includes a new omni-directional logo that interacts across all levels of the brand architecture, imagery and messaging. 

The rebrand embodies the GF Smith’s values, their role in the contemporary creative landscape and their commitment to community, colour and creativity.

The solution

Within the brand's rebranding, typography is one of the key players, alongside the color palette and logo. Indeed, it is through the GF Smith emblem that the Templo agency finds the tone for the communication: the company name is composed in the form of a typographic smiley set on an invisible sphere and oriented to the four winds.

“We worked on getting the right facial feature (for the logo), smiling rather than winking or angry,”

The initial choice fell on Homie, originally inspired by the humanist sans typefaces of the early XXth century. Indeed, the Homie  departs from its models to approach a neo-grotesk with humanistic vestiges, bringing warmth and modernity to the whole: exactly the values of the papermaker. What's more, Templo agency makes extensive use of contemporary linéales, preferably in relatively bold, capitalized typefaces.

Blaze Type's first task was to redesign the logo's glyphs to solve the legibility problems caused by spherical distortion.

The results of this initial work were used to make a series of minor corrections to maintain the logo's typographic consistency. The middle crossbars of the F and E are lowered, the tops of the i's are hollowed out in the image of Gill sans, and the arrows are also transformed: so many surgical touch-ups giving GF Homie a perfume of Great Britain, a spirit in keeping with its national culture.

“Traditionally, the UK has been our core market, but now I have partners in 30 countries selling GF Smith Colorplan around the world,” says Watkinson. “This identity sets us up for the future, domestically and internationally.”

Finally, Blaze Type continues to provide turnkey tools for incorporating different versions of the logo as glyphs within the GF Homie. Thus, several. The practice is not isolated, since Blaze has already struck out with the case of Fix Studio.

Although the back-and-forth was relatively small, with one job completed in just one quarter, the agency brought a solid, meticulous eye to the many typographic adjustments.

Although the family remains made up of a single typeface, it's through its inventive, colorful graphics that GF Homie becomes a stand-up actor, capable of taking on any role under a single guise.

“What we’ve created here is something that’s visually striking and taps into the values and personality of GF Smith. It’s like looking at GF Smith in the mirror.”