Coeur Mining Brand Guidelines: An Idaho Silver Miner of 1928, Now in Chicago

A silver company from northern Idaho.

Coeur Mining began in 1928, formed to mine silver in the Coeur d’Alene region of Idaho, according to English Wikipedia. For decades it was a mine operator in the north of the state, running among others the Coeur d’Alene Silver Mine, the Coeur Mine and the Galena Mine. Its name for most of that time was Coeur d’Alene Mines, taken directly from the district where it started.

The company widened its map from the 1980s. In 1983 it acquired Asarco’s operating lease on the Rochester mine near Lovelock in Nevada, a heap-leach surface silver and gold mine where production began in 1986, Wikipedia says; the district had been mined underground for high-grade silver and gold veins from 1909 to 1935. In 1987 it bought half of the Kensington property in the Alaskan panhandle, north-west of Juneau, an area first mined in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and in 1995 the other half. In 1991 it bought Callahan Mining, which brought the Galena mine and, briefly, Flexaust, a maker of flexible hose, duct and metal tubing that Coeur sold again in 1995.

The Idaho roots were wound down over the following decade. In 1995 Coeur and ASARCO placed their northern Idaho mines in a new company, Silver Valley Resources; the Coeur Mine closed in 1998, and in July 2006 Coeur sold its interest in Silver Valley Resources to U.S. Silver, Wikipedia records, ending its operations in the region where it was formed. Along the way it acquired, ran and sold mines in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and New Zealand, and held interests in Australian silver production.

In 2013 the company took its present name, Coeur Mining, Inc., and moved its head office from Coeur d’Alene to Chicago, Illinois. The same year it set up Coeur Capital to hold royalties and strategic investments, according to Wikipedia.

Mexico, Nevada, Alaska and, from 2026, Canada.

Coeur’s mines today are spread across North America. Mexico came first among the current set: in 2007 Coeur acquired the Palmarejo project in Chihuahua from Bolnisi Gold and Palmarejo Silver and Gold Corporation, and the mine went into production in 2008, Wikipedia says. Kensington, the underground gold mine in Alaska, entered production on 3 July 2010, after a long permitting dispute. That dispute reached the US Supreme Court, which on 22 June 2009 ruled six to three that the Army Corps of Engineers, rather than the Environmental Protection Agency, had authority to issue the permits for the mine to discharge processed wastewater into a lake, according to the case summary on Oyez.

Coeur became sole owner of the Wharf gold mine in South Dakota after the merger of Wharf Ltd. and Wharf USA in the 1980s; in 2022 Coeur applied to expand it, and the state board approved the expansion in July 2023, Wikipedia says. In 2017 Coeur acquired the Silvertip property in northern British Columbia, which it now describes as a polymetallic critical minerals exploration project.

Two acquisitions in two years then changed the size of the company. The purchase of SilverCrest Metals, announced jointly on 4 October 2024, was completed on 14 February 2025, Coeur announced through Business Wire; it brought the Las Chispas silver-gold mine in Sonora, Mexico. The purchase of New Gold, announced on 3 November 2025, was completed on 20 March 2026, adding the New Afton gold-copper mine in British Columbia and the Rainy River gold-silver mine in Ontario. Coeur shares began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol CDE on 16 March 2026, alongside the New York listing. With that closing, Coeur says it has seven wholly owned operations: New Afton, Rainy River, Las Chispas, Palmarejo, Rochester, Kensington and Wharf.

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.

One word kept from a district name.

The 2013 rename is the clearest identity decision on record. The old name, Coeur d’Alene Mines, tied the company to one Idaho district it had already left; the new one kept only the first word and added “Mining”, the same year the head office moved to Chicago. The ticker stayed CDE, the initials of the original name, and since March 2026 the same three letters have been used on both the New York and Toronto exchanges, Coeur announced.

The company’s own wording places it as a US-based precious metals producer, the phrase it uses in the closing note of its news releases, where it lists every operation by name, metal and state or province. That list has changed often. In February 2025 it named five operations; in March 2026, seven, with two Canadian mines added at the top.

The list also shows the metal mix. Coeur began as a silver company, and the SilverCrest deal added a silver-gold mine, but its releases now describe Kensington and Wharf as gold mines, New Afton as gold-copper and Rainy River as gold-silver. Rochester and Las Chispas are both described as silver-gold.

For a design guide, Coeur Mining shows how a miner can carry a regional name through a change of headquarters, metals and countries by shortening it rather than replacing it. Compare Hecla Mining, another North American silver miner, and Newmont, a US gold producer. For this guide we use a deep slate blue, a cool silver grey and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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