Cincinnati, 1837.

Procter & Gamble is named after two men who made different things from the same raw material. Wikipedia says William Procter, a candlemaker born in England, and James Gamble, a soap maker born in Ireland, both settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, and met when they married two sisters, Olivia and Elizabeth Norris. Their father-in-law, Alexander Norris, persuaded them to go into business together, and in 1837 the partnership of Procter & Gamble was created. Candles and soap both came from animal fat, and Cincinnati, a river town with a busy meat trade, had plenty of it.

The name has always been a pair of surnames joined by an ampersand, and that ampersand carries a good deal of the identity. The company is incorporated and headquartered in Cincinnati to this day, Wikipedia says, and its full corporate name is The Procter & Gamble Company. In everyday use the name shrinks to three characters, P&G, which is the form most people now see on packaging, in advertising and on the company’s own buildings.

For much of its history the company’s products were better known than its name. In the 1880s, Wikipedia says, Procter & Gamble began to sell an inexpensive soap that floated in water and called it Ivory. Later brands followed the same pattern: a product name in large type on the front of the pack, and the maker’s name in small type on the back. The corporate brand worked mainly as a guarantee to retailers and investors, while each product spoke for itself to shoppers.

Advertising made that model familiar. Wikipedia says P&G advertised its products on radio in the 1920s and, from 1932, sponsored daytime serials, which became known as soap operas because of who paid for them. The company went on to sponsor and produce serials for television across six decades. A literary form took its name from the soap that paid for the airtime, which is a rare thing for a corporate sponsor to leave behind. The company’s own mark, though, had a much older and stranger history, which began not with soap but with candles.

A cross, a star and a man in the moon.

The moon-and-stars trademark began as a shipping mark. The Skeptic, in an article published in its fifth volume in 1991, traced the logo to a simple sketch of a cross in a circle used to mark shipments of Star Candles, one of the company’s early products, in 1851. Over time, the magazine said, the cross developed into a star in a circle, and later the single star was replaced by thirteen stars, in honour of the original thirteen colonies of the United States. Wikipedia adds that the crude cross was painted by barge workers on the Ohio River so that crates of candles could be recognised.

The face came next. The final embellishment, according to The Skeptic, was a man-in-the-moon figure, an old man’s bearded face in a crescent moon facing the stars, all set within a circle. The magazine quoted the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand describing the man in the moon as a design as familiar around the turn of the twentieth century as the smiley face became decades later. In 1930, The Skeptic reported, a sculptor was commissioned to create the definitive version of the design.

That version ran for decades on cartons, letterheads and share certificates. It was an engraver’s image rather than a modern logo: a face, a crescent, a ring and a field of small stars, full of fine lines that suited print at the size of a coin or a seal. It looked like something from a nineteenth-century almanac, which in a sense it was, and it gave a soap and candle business a mark with a hint of the night sky.

The mark drew unwanted attention in the 1980s: The Skeptic reported in 1991 that from 1981 a false rumour linked the symbol to Satanism, which the company denied. Wikipedia says P&G simplified the details of the logo in 1991, and in 1995 replaced the moon and stars with a text-only logo. The face in the moon, after more than a century in one form or another, gave way to letters.

Founders, marks and initials.

A corporate group’s identity has a different job from a single product’s. It has to sit above many businesses at once, often in places the public never sees: an annual report, a shipyard gate, a share certificate, a letterhead, a hard hat. That tends to push group marks towards restraint. Many began with a founder’s name or a place name, and some compressed it into a monogram or a set of initials that could be stamped, embroidered or painted at any size.

Over time the mark usually becomes a parent signature rather than a face. Operating units keep their own names and colours, while the group mark appears in a fixed position as an endorsement, a small line of type or a symbol in a corner. Designers working at this level spend much of their effort on rules for how parent and child marks sit together.

Renames are part of the story too. When a group spins off a division, merges two lines or shifts what it does, the name and mark are often rewritten to match, and older letterforms linger on buildings and archives for years. For designers, the useful lessons are about durability, hierarchy and how a single sign can carry a long and changing history.

From the moon to the initials.

What replaced the moon was typography. Since 1995, Wikipedia says, the corporate logo has been built from lettering rather than a picture, and in 2013 the company unveiled a new logo with a hint of a crescent moon behind the text. The modern identity rests on the initials P&G, and the crescent is a quiet nod to the older seal: the moon returned, but as a shape behind the letters rather than as a face.

The ampersand is the hinge of the mark. In the full name it joins two surnames, Procter and Gamble, as it did on the 1837 partnership; in the short form it sits between two capitals and becomes the most distinctive shape in the word. A mark built from initials and an ampersand is easy to reproduce in any medium, from a television sign-off to an annual report, and it carries no picture that could be misread.

The older symbol still has a place in the company’s story. The Skeptic’s 1991 account presents the moon and stars as a mark with a documented history, from a cross painted on candle crates to a star, to thirteen stars, to a sculpted face. Wikipedia records the 1991 simplification, the 1995 text-only logo and the 2013 logo with its crescent. The two marks, the pictorial seal and the typographic initials, sum up the two eras of the identity: one made for engraved certificates and wooden crates, and one made for screens and small labels.

The corporate name stays in Cincinnati, where the two brothers-in-law founded the partnership, and the company today is The Procter & Gamble Company, a publicly listed group still headquartered in that city.

For a design guide, Procter & Gamble shows how a pictorial seal from the age of engraving can give way to a set of initials without losing the thread of its history. Compare Unilever, another soap maker that became a house of brands, and Johnson & Johnson, a second founder’s name joined by an ampersand. For this guide we use sky, royal and midnight with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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