Elo Brand Guidelines: Elographics, Five Owners & a Touchscreen Now at Zebra

A physicist’s company in Tennessee.

Elo began as Elographics, a company founded in 1971 by George Samuel Hurst, a physicist who had worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and became a professor of physics at the University of Kentucky in 1966, according to English Wikipedia. The same article says Elographics developed a version of resistive touchscreen technology and secured several patents, and lists Hurst’s later touch-sensor patents from 2003 to 2011.

The step from a pad to a screen came a few years later. English Wikipedia’s history of the touchscreen says that in 1977 Elographics, in partnership with Siemens, began work on a transparent version of the opaque touchpad technology Hurst had developed.

Elo tells this history in strong terms. Its website says, “we invented the touchscreen over 50 years ago,” and the company’s press release of December 2018 described Elo as “the original inventor of the touchscreen.” Those are the company’s own words. Today it claims more than 50 years in touchscreens, more than 35 million installations and more than 400 patents, and says, “We know touch — it’s our only business.”

The company also lists the places its screens turn up: gaming machines, interactive kiosks, hospitality systems, point-of-sale terminals, wayfinding displays, retail displays and transport. Its portfolio, it says, runs from 7-inch to 65-inch interactive displays, built for commercial use, and covers five touch technologies — surface acoustic wave, projected capacitive, surface capacitive, infrared and resistive. The company says its products are made for long lifecycles, of up to ten years or more.

Raychem, Tyco, Gores, Crestview, Zebra.

Elo has changed hands several times. English Wikipedia’s article on Raychem, the Menlo Park materials company, says Raychem developed the touchscreen “that became popular under the name Elo TouchSystems,” and that Tyco International acquired Raychem in 1999. English Wikipedia also records that in 2006 “Tyco International’s Elo division” introduced Acoustic Pulse Recognition, a touch technology first created by SoundTouch Ltd. Tyco’s electronics business later became TE Connectivity.

On 4 June 2012, The Gores Group, the Los Angeles investment firm, announced that an affiliate had completed its acquisition of Elo Touch Solutions from TE Connectivity. The release described the business as a supplier of touchscreens, touch monitors and all-in-one touch computers, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and listed its technologies: surface acoustic wave, resistive, projected capacitive, acoustic pulse recognition, infrared and optical.

On 14 December 2018 Gores and Crestview Partners announced that funds managed by Crestview had completed their acquisition of Elo, then headquartered in Milpitas, California. The release described point-of-sale terminals, interactive kiosks and healthcare and industrial control interfaces as part of the range.

The latest owner is Zebra Technologies, the Illinois maker of barcode scanners, printers and mobile computers. On 1 October 2025 Zebra announced that it had completed its acquisition of Elo Touch Solutions, Inc., noting that Elo had been majority owned since 2018 by funds managed by Crestview. Zebra described Elo’s offer as point-of-sale, self-serve kiosks and interactive digital displays for retail, hospitality, quick-service restaurants, healthcare and industry. It pointed to convenience stores, quick-service restaurants and self-checkout as settings where fast or self-service is required, and to Elo’s accessibility features for people with sight impairment or colour blindness. Zebra said that over time it would offer a common platform across mobile and fixed digital touchpoints in stores.

How terminal makers present themselves.

Payment terminals are made to be handled, and their makers tend to show them in use: a countertop unit beside a till, a PIN pad turned towards the shopper, a portable terminal carried to a restaurant table, an unattended reader fitted to a vending machine or a fuel pump. Product pictures move between that wider scene and the close-up — a card or a phone held over the contactless symbol, a receipt coming out of the printer, a total on the screen. Some pages open a device up into an exploded diagram of casing, screen, keypad and board.

Much of what these companies sell cannot be photographed at all. Their websites set hardware beside software, device management and payment services. Ingenico’s current site groups its devices by use — portable, countertop, PIN pad, mobile, self-service — before it names a range, and Verifone’s places its Victa devices alongside software, payment processing and controllers for fuel stations.

The trade meets at fairs, and launches are timed to them. Verifone presented its new identity in November 2014 in the same week as Money20/20 in Las Vegas and the CARTES show in Paris, according to the consultancy that designed it, and Ingenico showed new terminals at EuroCIS, the retail-technology fair in Düsseldorf, in February 2025, the German trade title IT Finanzmagazin reported.

Ingenico and Verifone have each changed owners more than once and kept their names. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, which ranges it sells and how its identity has changed — and keeps the companies’ own claims apart from what independent sources report.

One short word, said “E-low.”

Elo publishes its own brand guidelines on its website. They say “Elo” is the official brand and should appear as one word, while “Elo Touch Solutions, Inc.” is the legal company name for contracts and financial documents; capitalised forms and “Elo Touch” are listed as mistakes. The brand is pronounced “E-low.” A word that follows “Elo” is set in lower case unless it names a product. Since the Zebra deal, the guidelines ask that the first mention of Elo in new marketing copy add “Now part of Zebra Technologies.”

The same page sets out the visual rules. The logo must not be altered, recoloured or given glows, drop shadows or textures, and it has minimum sizes for print and screen. The main typeface is Avenir Next LT Pro, used in all weights and especially bold and medium, with Arial as the secondary and system font for emails and presentations. The core colours are blues — a bright sky blue for the logo and a deeper accent blue for calls to action — with a set of greys, including a dark grey for most titles, and green, yellow, red and cyan reserved for app interfaces. “Our blues are bold,” the page says. The palette in this guide uses tones of our own choosing, not those values.

Elo’s current range runs from open-frame touchscreens and touch monitors to all-in-one touch computers, POS terminals, signage, mobile computers and the EloView device-management software. In November 2026 it announced the Elo Pay M61 mobile POS computer and an updated 22-inch Elo Pay tap-to-pay unit.

For a design guide, Elo shows a component maker that became a branded hardware company and kept one short name through five owners. Compare Posiflex, a Taipei maker of touchscreen POS terminals, and SUNMI, a Shanghai maker of smart POS devices. For this guide we use a touch blue and a graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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