United Nations Brand Guidelines: A 1945 Delegate’s Pin, Olive Branches & a Restricted Emblem

A conference badge that outlasted its conference.

The United Nations came out of the Second World War. English Wikipedia records that the name began as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s term for the Allied countries, used in the Declaration by United Nations of January 1942. The UN Conference on International Organization opened in San Francisco on 25 April 1945; delegates from 50 countries signed the Charter there on 26 June 1945; and the organisation formally came into existence on 24 October 1945, after ratification. Today it has 193 member states, with headquarters in New York and other major offices in Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna.

The emblem started as a piece of conference stationery. The CIA, in a history published in October 2022, says the US State Department asked the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, to help with graphics for the conference. The team was headed by the architect and industrial designer Oliver Lundquist, and the conference’s director of graphics was the architect Donal McLaughlin. Their job included a lapel pin that delegates could wear as identification. UN Dispatch noted in January 2009 that the design was intended only for delegates’ badges, not as a logo for any organisation.

UN News, in an October 2009 article, says McLaughlin’s draft was chosen from the team’s ideas: a view of the atlas from the North Pole down, with every continent except Antarctica, North America at the centre, and the conference’s name, date and location within a circle. Other members of the team placed the globe first between crossed laurel branches and then between two olive branches. English Wikipedia adds that the pin measured 1 1/16 inches across and that McLaughlin’s group drew about nine designs.

That first version was shaped by its moment. UN Dispatch says it centred on the United States as host and left out southern South America because Argentina was not then expected to join, which it later did. A revised design was adopted as the emblem by General Assembly resolution 92(I) on 7 December 1946, with changed colours and the continents centred along the international date line, UN News reports. English Wikipedia says the map was extended to 60 degrees south. The flag followed, under resolution 167(II) of 20 October 1947: the emblem in white, centred on a blue field.

Blue, olive and a map seen from above.

The blue has its own history. English Wikipedia and UN Dispatch both say it was chosen in 1945 as the opposite of red, the colour of war. Wikipedia says the group’s original shade was a grey blue, unofficially called “Stettinius Blue” after Edward Stettinius, who chaired the US delegation, and chosen because no national flag then used it. Graphéine, the French branding agency, wrote in December 2023 that the pale blue soon became known as “UN blue.” On the exact shade, Wikipedia gives two accounts: that one has never been officially specified, and that a UN page once gave Pantone 279 before a UN branding guide settled on Pantone 2925 in 2020.

The flag’s geometry is written down. The UN Flag Code and its regulations, first issued in December 1947 and amended in November 1952, set proportions of 2:3 or 3:5 and make the emblem one half of the hoist. English Wikipedia describes the map as an azimuthal equidistant projection with five concentric circles, inside a wreath of crossed olive branches, and says the olive stands for peace and the map for the people and countries of the world. It also traces McLaughlin’s projection to wartime maps by the cartographer Richard Edes Harrison.

The mark travels. UN News described it in 2009 as carried on peacekeepers’ helmets, on helicopters and trucks carrying aid, and on leaflets as well as posters, books and postcards. Peacekeepers wear their home countries’ uniforms with blue helmets or berets, and English Wikipedia says the forces received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988. Language is built into the system too: the six official languages are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

The identity extends to architecture and campaigns. The New York headquarters, completed in 1952, was designed by a board of architects led by Wallace Harrison, with final projects developed by Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier. In 2015 the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, the public name for the Sustainable Development Goals, gained a logo and 17 icons from Jakob Trollbäck of Trollbäck + Company, asked by Richard Curtis of Project Everyone, Graphic Design USA reported. The task, it said, was to turn dense political language into something comprehensible across cultures. The emblem also draws responses from outside: in December 2023 Graphéine described “Climate Changed,” an unofficial concept by the Norwegian designers Ole Andreas Finseth and Thale Riiser, which redrew the map’s coasts to show rising seas.

Emblems, flags and field marks.

United Nations bodies share a family look that began with a single conference pin. The UN’s own emblem, a world map seen from the North Pole, was first set between crossed laurel branches and then between two olive branches, UN News recorded in 2009, and the General Assembly adopted a revised version in December 1946. Other bodies in the system have their own marks; English Wikipedia says the World Health Organization’s features the Rod of Asclepius, and it lists a family of agency flags derived from the UN’s.

Blue does much of the work. The UN Flag Code, issued in 1947 and amended in 1952, puts the white emblem on a blue field at fixed proportions, and the Code bars the flag from commercial use. On the ground the same marks appear on working equipment: UN News described the emblem on peacekeepers’ helmets, on helicopters and trucks carrying aid, and on leaflets. In refugee camps, English Wikipedia says, sleeping accommodation is frequently tents, prefabricated huts or dwellings built from local materials.

Paper is the other public face of these bodies. Reports, resolutions and flagship publications carry the name year after year: UNDP’s Human Development Report dates from 1990. Language is part of the system too. The UN’s six official languages are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, and some bodies change their initials with the language, as UNDP does with PNUD in French and Spanish.

Use of these names and marks is restricted. General Assembly resolution 92(I) of 1946 prohibits use of the UN’s emblem, seal, name and initials without the Secretary-General’s authorisation, in particular for commercial purposes, a UNOPS instruction of 2020 explains. This guide therefore sets out what can be checked about each body’s founding, name and visual history, and reproduces no emblem, flag or logo.

A protected mark, and a record under scrutiny.

The mark is not free to use. A UNOPS operational instruction dated July 2020 summarises resolution 92(I): use of the UN’s emblem, official seal and name, and abbreviations of that name, is prohibited without authorisation by the Secretary-General, in particular for commercial purposes through trade marks or commercial labels. The Flag Code separately says that on no account shall the flag or a replica be used for commercial purposes or in direct association with an article of merchandise. National law has followed in places; WIPO Lex lists a 1953 El Salvador law protecting the UN’s names and emblems.

The organisation has been criticised for perceived ineffectiveness, bias and corruption, English Wikipedia says. It says the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the 1994 genocide amid indecision in the Security Council, and that UN inaction is blamed for the failure to prevent the Srebrenica massacre. It also records accusations from 2004 that the Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq had suffered from widespread corruption, and that an independent inquiry created by the UN found many of its officials had been involved in the scheme.

Two peacekeeping cases are documented in dated reporting. Cholera reached Haiti in 2010; researchers say it was introduced by Nepalese troops in a UN mission, the Associated Press reported on 1 December 2016, when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologised to the Haitian people. “We simply did not do enough,” he said; AP noted that he stopped short of apologising for bringing the disease, that the outbreak had afflicted some 800,000 people and killed more than 9,000, and that the UN had answered lawsuits in US courts by claiming immunity, which an appeals court upheld. In April 2017 an AP investigation found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel over 12 years, more than 300 of them involving children, along with a leaked internal report on a child sex ring in Haiti involving 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers. No one was jailed for that abuse, AP reported.

Its finances are under pressure as well. English Wikipedia says funding problems grew severe after 2020 through late or withheld payments by member states, and that in January 2026 Secretary-General António Guterres wrote to members warning of an “imminent financial collapse.”

For a design guide, the United Nations shows how a mark made for one conference can become permanent, with its rules written down afterwards. Compare UNDP, the UN’s development agency, and UNICEF, its children’s agency. For this guide we use a slate sky blue, an olive and a stone white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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