AngloGold Ashanti Brand Guidelines: Johannesburg, Obuasi and a 2023 Move to Denver

A Johannesburg gold house and a Ghanaian mine.

AngloGold Ashanti is the product of two older businesses. The first was AngloGold, formed in June 1998 by consolidating the gold and uranium interests of Anglo American and its associated companies in South Africa into a single gold company, Mining Technology reported in February 2021. The same feature notes that Anglo American itself was founded in South Africa in 1917 by Ernest Oppenheimer. English Wikipedia describes AngloGold at the time of the merger as a South African gold miner majority-owned by the Anglo American group.

The second was the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation of Ghana. Its mine at Obuasi, in the Ashanti Region about 60 kilometres from Kumasi, has been worked on an industrial scale since 1897, when the company was formed, English Wikipedia says; the gold of the region gave the old Gold Coast its name. Ashanti Goldfields was floated by the Ghanaian government, its majority shareholder, on the London and Ghana stock exchanges in 1994, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996, which Wikipedia describes as the first listing of an African company on Wall Street.

The merger was announced on 16 May 2003. After the High Court of Ghana approved it, AngloGold Ashanti was formed on 26 April 2004, with Ashanti shareholders receiving AngloGold shares, according to English Wikipedia. The Obuasi operation was renamed AngloGold Ashanti Ghana in 2004.

Labour history and a changing portfolio.

AngloGold’s South African mines came out of the apartheid-era gold industry, and that history is part of the company’s background. Black mineworkers on South Africa’s mines were organised by the National Union of Mineworkers, founded in 1982 and recognised for bargaining by the Chamber of Mines in 1983; English Wikipedia says the union campaigned through the 1980s to end the job reservation system, under which the best-paid mine jobs were kept for white workers. In August 1987 the union called a strike over wages, hostel conditions and other grievances at some 60 gold and coal mines, with about 330,000 black miners taking part, the global union federation ICEM recalled in an article dated 13 August 2007. It said the employers were led by the Anglo American Corporation, which employed most of the unionised black miners, that black miners were paid much less than white miners, and that about 50,000 strikers were dismissed before the strike ended on 30 August 1987.

The legacy reached the courts later. In July 2019 the High Court in Johannesburg approved a class-action settlement between former gold mineworkers and six companies, including AngloGold Ashanti and Anglo American South Africa, over silicosis and tuberculosis claims, Reuters reported through Africanews on 28 July 2019; the companies had agreed to it in May 2018, and the suit had been launched in 2012.

The company’s map has changed since 2004. In 2009 it sold its third of the Boddington mine in Western Australia to Newmont, and in 2020 it sold its last South African mining assets to Harmony Gold, after which it had no operations left in the country, English Wikipedia says. It holds 45 percent of the Kibali joint venture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is operated by Barrick, and 70 percent of the Tropicana operation in Western Australia. It acquired the Sukari mine in Egypt through its purchase of Centamin, completed on 22 November 2024, and the sale of its Serra Grande mine in Brazil to Aura Minerals was completed on 1 December 2025, Wikipedia records.

Obuasi itself went through a long pause. Mining there stopped in late 2014 and the mine was placed on care and maintenance; after Ghanaian government approvals in 2018 it was redeveloped as a mechanised underground mine, with its first gold pour in December 2019 and commercial production from 1 October 2020, according to English Wikipedia.

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.

A South African name now run from Denver.

The biggest change to the company’s identity came in 2023. A corporate restructuring announced on 12 May and approved by shareholders on 18 August gave the group a UK corporate domicile and moved its primary listing to the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares began trading on 25 September 2023 under the ticker AU, The Star reported on 27 September 2023. The group is now headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and keeps a substantial corporate office in Johannesburg. It kept secondary listings in South Africa, on the JSE and A2X, and on the Ghana Stock Exchange.

The company has also drawn criticism. In January 2011 it received the Public Eye Global Award, given at Davos by the Swiss organisation then known in English as the Berne Declaration, after a nomination by the Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining, English Wikipedia records. The same article notes that AngloGold Ashanti is a signatory participant of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights.

For a design guide, AngloGold Ashanti shows how a merged company can carry two places in one name and keep both after moving its head office to a third country. Compare Anglo American, whose gold interests formed AngloGold in 1998, and Gold Fields, another gold miner with South African roots. For this guide we use a reef bronze, a shaft ink and a doré gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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