Pan American Silver Brand Guidelines: Ross Beaty’s 1994 Miner, Yamana & MAG Silver

A founder’s second company and a run of Latin American mines.

Pan American Silver was founded in April 1994 by Ross Beaty, who had earlier founded and run Equinox Resources and sold it to an American mining company, English Wikipedia says. The company listed on NASDAQ in 1995 and bought its first mine, Quiruvilca in Peru, the same year. It is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and its shares trade in New York and Toronto under the symbol PAAS, the company said in 2023.

The early growth was silver, mine by mine. Pan American bought the La Colorada mine in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1998 and the Huarón mine in Peru in 2000, English Wikipedia says. In 2012 it acquired Minefinders, whose main asset was the Dolores mine in Chihuahua; in 2018 it temporarily curtailed operations at Dolores, citing violence in the area. Wikipedia gives its 2017 output as about 25 million ounces of silver, alongside gold, zinc, lead and copper; La Colorada alone produced 7.1 million ounces of silver that year, Dolores 4.2 million, Huarón 3.7 million and the San Vicente mine in Potosí, Bolivia, 3.6 million.

In November 2018 Pan American announced that it would acquire Tahoe Resources, a Nevada-based miner whose largest asset was the Escobal silver mine in Guatemala. Escobal was not operating when the company described its portfolio in 2023, and English Wikipedia says it remains suspended pending a consultation with Indigenous communities ordered by Guatemala’s Supreme Court. A 2020 study by EJAtlas, MiningWatch Canada, Earthworks and the Institute for Policy Studies listed the company among those involved in environmental conflicts in Latin America, English Wikipedia notes.

Yamana’s mines and a share of Juanicipio.

The largest step came in 2023. Yamana Gold, a Toronto company also founded in 1994 and listed in Toronto, New York and London, had built a portfolio of gold, silver and copper mines in Canada, Chile, Brazil and Argentina, English Wikipedia says; the Jacobina mine in Brazil had come to it through a 2006 merger with Desert Sun Mining. On 31 March 2023 Pan American announced that it had completed its acquisition of Yamana Gold, after Yamana sold its Canadian assets, including its interest in the Canadian Malartic mine, to Agnico Eagle. The arrangement added four producing mines — the Jacobina complex in Brazil, El Peñón and Minera Florida in Chile, and Cerro Moro in Argentina — and the MARA development project in Argentina. Chief executive Michael Steinmann called the deal “transformative,” saying it greatly increased the scale of the company’s work in Latin America, where it had operated for nearly three decades.

Steinmann said he expected a material increase in the company’s production of both silver and gold. In the same release the company described itself as a leading producer of precious metals in the Americas, with silver and gold mines in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

The next step was a share in a single mine. Pan American completed its purchase of MAG Silver in September 2025, a TipRanks item reported in September 2026, adding the 44% interest in Juanicipio, in Zacatecas, that MAG had held. The other 56% belongs to Fresnillo, which built and operates the mine, Fresnillo says.

How silver miners present themselves.

Silver miners speak mainly to investors, governments and the communities around their mines, and their visual identities tend to follow from that audience. Palettes lean on metallic greys and silvers, often paired with a deep blue or slate, sometimes warmed by an earth tone drawn from rock or desert. Typography is usually a plain sans or a sober serif, set for long reports rather than for packaging, because there is no consumer product on a shelf to sell.

Photography carries much of the identity. Company websites and annual reports tend to show mills, headframes, haul roads and open pits set against mountain or desert landscapes, alongside portraits of workers in protective gear and views of nearby towns. Maps matter too: a miner’s portfolio is a set of places, and operation pages are commonly organised mine by mine and country by country, each with its location, ownership share, processing facilities and expected mine life.

Numbers form a second visual language. Mineral reserves and resources statements, quarterly production reports and guidance tables are published on fixed calendars, and their charts, tonnages and grades are repeated across press releases and investor presentations. Because these figures are regulated disclosures, they tend to look alike from company to company, and the brand shows mostly in the colour of a chart or the cover of a report.

The third strand is sustainability. Most listed miners keep pages on water, tailings management, energy use, community relations and human rights, often with downloadable reports and lists of the standards they say they follow. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a consistent palette, a clear type hierarchy and careful photography do most of the work, and the identity must hold together across a website, a technical report and a slide shown to analysts.

A silver name over silver and gold segments.

Juanicipio is an underground silver-gold mine with its own flotation plant, 14 kilometres from the Fresnillo mine in the Fresnillo district of Zacatecas, according to Fresnillo, which built and runs it. Its ore comes from two main vein systems, Valdecañas and Juanicipio.

The company also sells assets it does not plan to develop. On 15 September 2026 Cadillac Mines, a Toronto exploration company, said it had completed its purchase of Pan American’s Larder property in Ontario under an agreement dated 7 May 2026, in a GlobeNewswire release.

The map is now wide. As of February 2025, English Wikipedia lists 12 operating mines across Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Canada, from Shahuindo in the Cajamarca region of Peru to the Timmins operation in Ontario and Cerro Moro in the Santa Cruz province of Argentina.

Today Pan American reports in two parts. Its silver segment includes La Colorada, Juanicipio, Huarón and Cerro Moro; its gold segment includes Jacobina, Timmins in Ontario, El Peñón and Shahuindo in Peru. That is how a TipRanks summary described the company in September 2026, when it reported mineral reserves as at 30 June 2026 that included its share of Juanicipio: about 511.1 million ounces of proven and probable silver reserves and about 6.3 million ounces of gold. The same summary said the company had drilled 351,000 metres by 31 August 2026, toward a planned 500,000 metres for the year, with the focus on exploration near its existing mines.

For a design guide, Pan American Silver shows how a company can keep a founding name while its map and its metal mix change around it. Compare Fresnillo, its partner at Juanicipio, and Agnico Eagle, which split Yamana Gold with it in 2023. For this guide we use a deep blue, silver grey and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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