A company of 1924 that took the name of its own petrol brand.

TotalEnergies is the newest name for a company that began more than a century ago. France 24, reporting for AFP on 21 May 2021, wrote that the group was founded in 1924 as the Compagnie française des pétroles. English Wikipedia says that it was set up at the urging of the French president Raymond Poincaré, who wanted an entirely French oil company, and that Ernest Mercier founded the CFP that year with the support of a large group of banks and companies.

For three decades the company was known by its initials. The name Total came later and from the forecourt. English Wikipedia records that in 1954 the CFP branded its downstream products as Total in Africa and Europe, so the word drivers saw on pumps and cans was the brand name, not the company name. The parent kept its formal title for another generation.

Then the brand began to take over the company. The same article says that in 1985 the CFP renamed itself Total CFP, to build on the popularity of its petrol brand, and that in 1991 the name became simply Total, the year it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. A word chosen for a retail product had become the name of the whole group.

The 1990s brought a merger name. English Wikipedia says that after Total took over the Belgian company Petrofina in 1999 it was known as Total Fina, and that after it also acquired Elf Aquitaine it was named TotalFinaElf in 2000. The three-part name did not last. In 2003 the group reverted to Total, and English Wikipedia notes that a globe logo was unveiled during that rebranding.

The head office sits in the Tour Total in the La Défense business district, in Courbevoie, west of Paris. English Wikipedia says the tower was built between 1983 and 1985 for Elf Aquitaine and passed to Total after the merger with Elf in 2000, so even the group’s address carries a trace of one of the companies that went into it.

Carré Noir, a gradient and lower-case letters.

The current name was announced well before it was adopted. The French design agency Grapheine, writing on 2 June 2021, recorded that the chief executive, Patrick Pouyanné, posted on 9 February 2021 that Total would change its name to TotalEnergies, and described the new name as a way to anchor the group’s move into several kinds of energy. France 24 reported on 21 May 2021 that the group would put the new name to shareholders at its general meeting on 28 May, and English Wikipedia says shareholders approved it at that meeting.

The new look was unveiled the same day. Grapheine reported that on 28 May the group showed its new identity and the new face of a TotalEnergies service station in La Défense, which Pouyanné unveiled in the new colours and logo. The identity was created by the Paris agency Carré Noir, part of Publicis, and Grapheine wrote that the agency took nine months to deliver the project. A hand-drawn advertisement in rainbow colours accompanied the launch, meant, the company said, to symbolise “all energies”.

The mark itself, as Grapheine described it, is built on a colour gradient, a soft blend of colours across the symbol, which the agency linked to a design trend of 2019 and 2020 seen in app icons. Grapheine argued that the gradient was also a visual answer to a hard brief, since energy in its various forms is difficult to draw, and noted that a logo built on a blend has to be reproduced in full colour.

The lettering changed as much as the symbol. Grapheine summed up the shift in a few contrasts: goodbye to knife-cut capital letters, hello to rounded lower case; goodbye to monochrome, hello to gradients; goodbye to a monolithic block, hello to movement and lightness. It said the new letters reminded it of the typeface Gotham Rounded. The agency also noted that the previous logo had already introduced light blue and yellow-orange colours alongside the name.

Energy companies and their marks.

Industrial company names tend to start as descriptions of people or processes. Many began with a founder’s surname, a pair of partners’ names joined by an ampersand, or a long legal title that listed what the firm made and where. Over time those titles were shortened in everyday use, and the short form often became the official name: a surname on its own, or a set of initials that customers and staff had been using for decades.

The marks that sit beside those names are usually simple shapes. Squares, ovals, diamonds and plain rules recur because they print cleanly on drums, sacks, vehicles, signage and paperwork, and because they hold their shape at very small and very large sizes. Many identities rely on a single corporate colour, applied across a wordmark and a few supporting elements, rather than a broad palette.

Mergers and spin-offs test these systems. When companies combine, the new group must choose whether to keep one name, join two, or invent a third; when a group later splits, each part needs a name and mark of its own. Those decisions, and the dates on which they took effect, are often the clearest record of how an industrial brand has changed.

One name for a group, a team and a forecourt.

Grapheine was not uncritical of the 2021 design. In its June 2021 piece the agency questioned whether the group needed a new logo at all, given that the previous one already used colour to suggest energy, and it judged that the result lacked solidity and coherence. It also pointed out the practical side of a rebrand at this scale, with forecourt signs to change across many countries over a long rollout.

The new name also reached the group’s sponsorships. English Wikipedia notes that the professional cycling team the group backed was renamed Team TotalEnergies in 2021, in time for that year’s Tour de France. The older Total name had already appeared in motor racing: the same article says the Total logo was carried on Red Bull Racing cars from 2009 to 2016, on Renault Formula One cars in 2009, 2010 and 2016, and on Lotus cars from 2011 to 2014.

Underneath the new identity, the history of the name runs in a clear line. The initials CFP gave way to a product brand, Total, which became the company name in 1991, absorbed Fina and Elf for a few years, returned alone in 2003 and then gained a plural suffix in 2021. Each step kept the word Total, so the 2021 change added to the name rather than replacing it.

France 24 placed the change in a wider pattern in its May 2021 report, listing earlier energy-company renames: Denmark’s Dong became Ørsted in 2017, and Norway’s Statoil became Equinor in 2018. The TotalEnergies change followed the same route of a shareholder vote, a new name and a new mark launched together.

For a design guide, TotalEnergies shows how an old product name can grow into a corporate one and then be extended, keeping its core word while the lettering moves from hard capitals to rounded lower case and the colour from a solid block to a blend. Compare Shell, whose pecten symbol anchors its identity, and Equinor, renamed from Statoil in 2018 with a redrawn star. For this guide we use red, amber and deep blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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