Kinross Brand Guidelines: A 1993 Toronto Merger, a Golden Retriever & Fort Knox

A 1993 amalgamation in Toronto.

Kinross Gold Corporation was formed in May 1993, when Plexus Resources Corporation, CMP Resources Ltd. and 1021105 Ontario Corp. pooled their interests, according to the International Directory of Company Histories. Two of the three were public gold companies; the third was owned equally by the gold miner Placer Dome and the investment firm Dundee Bancorp, which each took a stake in the new company and later sold it. English Wikipedia says the new company was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and NASDAQ on 1 June 1993, and on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. The company is based in Toronto.

Its first managers came from Dundee and Plexus. Robert Buchan, a Scottish-born mining engineer who studied at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, became chairman and chief executive; Art Ditto of Plexus became president. English Wikipedia names Buchan as the company’s founder and says he retired as president and chief executive in January 2005.

The early company was small and spread out. The Directory says it began with a 24 percent interest in the Denton-Rawhide mine in Nevada, then bought Falconbridge Gold, which brought two mines in Zimbabwe and the Hoyle Pond mine at Timmins, Ontario. Hoyle Pond produced most of the company’s gold in its first year, and by 1995 Kinross had eight producing gold mines in Canada, the United States and Zimbabwe, the Directory says.

One early Kinross image was not a logo. In 1994, the Directory records, a golden retriever appeared on the Kinross annual report as a company mascot. In 1997, when the gold price fell and Kinross posted its first annual loss, the dog was left off the report “to reflect the darkness of the period.”

Amax Gold, TVX, Echo Bay and Red Back.

Kinross grew mostly by merger. In 1998 it combined with Amax Gold of Denver, which was renamed Kinam Gold and became its largest subsidiary. The deal brought the Fort Knox open-pit mine near Fairbanks, Alaska, where English Wikipedia says no mining took place until 1996, along with interests in Russia and Chile. In January 2003 shareholders of Kinross, TVX Gold and Echo Bay Mines approved a three-way merger that kept the Kinross name, English Wikipedia says; TVX brought a stake in the La Coipa mine in Chile, and a 2007 asset swap with Goldcorp gave Kinross the rest of it.

In 2010 Kinross bought Red Back Mining, which owned the Tasiast mine in Mauritania and the Chirano mine in Ghana. Tasiast also brought legal and operating disputes. English Wikipedia says securities class actions filed in the United States and Canada in 2012 alleged that Kinross had overstated the mine’s value; the parties reached no-fault settlements in 2015. Operations at Tasiast were suspended in June 2016 over government allegations about work permits for foreign staff, and resumed that August.

In January 2016 Kinross bought the remaining half of the Round Mountain mine in Nevada, together with the nearby Bald Mountain mine, from Barrick. In August 2016 its Maricunga mine in Chile stopped operating after the Chilean authorities shut off the mine’s water supply over environmental concerns, English Wikipedia says. In February 2022 it completed the purchase of Great Bear Resources, the owner of a gold discovery near Red Lake, Ontario.

Kinross had worked in Russia since the mid-1990s, the Directory shows, and English Wikipedia calls the Kupol mine in Chukotka one of its most profitable operations. On 5 April 2022 Kinross said it would sell all its Russian assets to the Highland Gold Mining group, after pausing operations there following the invasion of Ukraine, the Canadian Press reported. The sale was completed in June 2022, Miners News reported on 21 June 2022, leaving Kinross with no remaining interests in Russia. It sold its stake in Chirano to Asante Gold in August 2022, English Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

Gold miners sell a metal that looks the same whoever digs it, so much of their visual identity is borrowed from the work itself. Their reports and websites return to a few images again and again: a doré bar being poured from a furnace, stacked bullion glowing under warm light, a headframe against the sky, and the long terraced walls of an open pit seen from the air.

Each region adds its own scenery. South African producers show the steel headframes of the Witwatersrand and underground stopes lit only by cap lamps; Australian miners show red earth and haul roads in the outback; Canadian companies increasingly show the Arctic, where Agnico Eagle’s Meadowbank mine poured Nunavut’s first gold bar in 2010, according to English Wikipedia, and where B2Gold’s Goose mine reached commercial production in October 2025. West African operations, such as B2Gold’s Fekola mine in Mali, bring savanna landscapes and the paperwork of new national mining codes.

Much of the industry’s printed identity sits in documents rather than products. Annual reports, sustainability reports and technical reports carry the logos, colours and photography; so do the slide decks shown to investors at gatherings such as the Denver Gold Forum in Colorado and Diggers and Dealers in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Community programmes, safety campaigns and agreements with Indigenous partners appear prominently in that material, alongside the maps and drill sections that geologists read.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it began, how its name and ownership changed, and where its mines are — and attributes figures and claims to the sources that give them. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretations, not the companies’ brand assets.

Six mines on three continents.

English Wikipedia lists six operating mines: Fort Knox in Alaska, which includes the Manh Choh deposit in which Kinross holds 70 percent; Round Mountain and Bald Mountain in Nevada; Paracatu in Minas Gerais, Brazil, which it calls Kinross’s largest producing mine; Tasiast in Mauritania; and La Coipa in Chile, which also produces silver. Citing company reports, it gives the company’s 2025 attributable output as about 2.0 million gold-equivalent ounces.

The main projects are in Canada and Chile. The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada describes the Great Bear project as a proposed open-pit and underground gold mine with an on-site mill, 23 kilometres southeast of Red Lake, Ontario, that would operate for about 20 years; its federal review was still under way in May 2026, when the public comment period on the summary of the impact statement closed. English Wikipedia says Kinross is also preparing the Lobo-Marte project in Chile.

Kinross sells gold and silver rather than consumer products. Around 2000, the Directory described its output as gold and silver in the form of doré, shipped to refineries for final processing. The company trades as K in Toronto and KGC in New York.

For a design guide, Kinross shows how a company assembled from mergers can keep one plain name across mines in Alaska, Nevada, Brazil, Chile and Mauritania. Compare Newmont, another North American gold miner, and Agnico Eagle, a Toronto gold miner. For this guide we use a slate blue, a deep blue and a dull gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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