Boston rights, Canadian company.

Bell Canada carries a family name. The company is named after Alexander Graham Bell, who also co-founded the Bell Telephone Company in Boston, Massachusetts, according to Wikipedia. Its Canadian story runs through his family: in 1879, Wikipedia says, Bell’s father sold his Canadian rights to the National Bell Telephone Company of Boston, formed earlier that year by a merger of the Bell Telephone Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company.

The Canadian company took its name a year later. In 1880 the Boston business was reorganised as the American Bell Telephone Company, the start of the Bell System, and the Canadian division was renamed The Bell Telephone Company of Canada Ltd., Wikipedia says. It came to be headed by the American executive Charles Fleetford Sise, who served as its general manager.

Its early equipment had local roots. Its telephones initially came, according to Wikipedia, from a business set up by Thomas C. Cowherd and his son James in a three-storey brick building in Brantford, Ontario; the Cowherds had been friends of Bell, had supplied the stovepipe wire for his early experiments at his father’s home at Tutelo Heights, and built telephones to Bell’s specifications for the Canadian market.

For nearly a century the company was part of a larger American system. Bell Canada operated as the Canadian subsidiary of the Bell System from 1880 to 1975, Wikipedia says, although, unlike the regional Bell companies in the United States, it ran its own research and development laboratories. Wikipedia records that AT&T held an ownership stake in the Canadian operating company during that period.

From “The Bell” to BCE.

The long official name was rarely used in conversation. Since its early years, Wikipedia says, The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd. was known colloquially as “The Bell” or “Bell Telephone”. The legal name caught up with everyday speech on 7 March 1968, when federal legislation renamed the company Bell Canada.

The company also had a manufacturing partner. The Bell System in Canada had two main companies, Wikipedia says: Bell Canada as the regional operating company and Northern Electric as the equipment maker, structured much like the relationship between the American operating companies and Western Electric. Bell Canada took full ownership of Northern Electric in 1964 and reduced its stake through public share offerings from 1973 while keeping control.

A holding company followed deregulation. In 1983, according to Wikipedia, Bell Canada Enterprises was formed as the parent of Bell Canada and Northern Telecom; the parent’s name was later shortened to BCE, which is still an abbreviation of the full title. In 2000 BCE distributed its holding in Nortel to its own shareholders, separating the two names.

The Bell name has since spread across the group. Wikipedia lists Bell Aliant in the Atlantic provinces, Bell Mobility for wireless service, Bell Satellite TV and Bell Fibe TV for television, and Bell Media, whose properties include the CTV Television Network. After BCE completed its purchase of Manitoba Telecom Services on 17 March 2017, the Manitoba business became Bell MTS. In the North, BCE acquired Northwestel in 1988 and later transferred it to Bell Canada in 1999.

Telecom names, symbols and colours.

Telecom identities tend to carry more history than their logos let on. Many of today’s operators began life as departments of a national post office or a state telecommunications authority, where the name described a function rather than a brand. When those monopolies were corporatised or privatised, the new companies usually needed names that could be registered, trademarked and spoken quickly in advertising, and the renames often shortened a long official title into an acronym, a coined word or a single syllable.

Visual systems in the category lean on a small set of devices. Single letters and short initials are common, partly because they scale down to an app icon or a shopfront fascia without losing legibility. Abstract symbols, such as a globe, a speech mark, a square or a ring, give a company a mark that can sit apart from the word. Colour does a large share of the work: in several markets, telecom companies have sought trademark protection for a specific shade, which makes a palette a legal asset as well as a design choice.

The guides in this round look at how each company’s name and mark were assembled, using dated reporting where it exists, and treat every palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

Beavers out, “er” in.

The current look dates from the summer of 2008. For the two years before it, Wikipedia says, Bell’s advertising starred Frank and Gordon, a pair of animated beavers used from 2006 to 2008. They were dropped as a new management team arrived: MobileSyrup reported on 8 August 2008 that Bell had just hired George Cope as president and chief executive, that he had set out a 90-day plan to restructure the business, and that Frank and Gordon had been let go.

The same report described the launch of the new brand with a simple, clean logo and a redesigned website. Teaser advertisements over the previous weeks had shown only the letters “er”, MobileSyrup said, before the tagline was revealed as “Today just got better”. The strategy was credited to the agencies Zulu Alpha Kilo, Leo Burnett, Ig2 and Cossette Communication Group. Cope said in a statement quoted by the site that the new brand underlined that Bell was moving forward as a company and as a service provider, “with new services, a new strategy and a new goal”.

The relaunch was timed to a sporting event. According to Wikipedia, the new logo and minimalist advertising style coincided with Bell’s campaign around its sponsorship of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The English line put the emphasis on the suffix “er”, while French Canada received “La vie est Bell”, a pun on “la vie est belle”. The lettering in Bell’s marketing is a custom typeface, Bell Slim, by the Canadian type designer Ian Brignell, Wikipedia says.

The Bell Mobility side of the group widened its range of names soon afterwards: Wikipedia says Bell has owned Virgin Mobile Canada since May 2009, and it lists Virgin Plus as a flanker brand of Bell Mobility.

For a design guide, Bell Canada shows how a nickname can become a legal name, and how a whole campaign can be hung on two letters. Compare AT&T, the former parent of the Bell System, and Canada Post, another national Canadian service brand. For this guide we use blue, a deep blue and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bell Canada’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.