Gramedia Brand Guidelines: A 1970 Jakarta Shophouse, a G Logotype and Jalma

A 25-square-metre shop in West Jakarta.

Gramedia began as a single small bookshop in Jakarta. English and Indonesian Wikipedia both date the founding of the chain to 2 February 1970 and place its first shop in a 25-square-metre shophouse on Jalan Gajah Mada in West Jakarta. They name P. K. Ojong and Jakob Oetama as its founders, the same two men behind the publishing group that still owns the chain. The range has widened since then: English Wikipedia lists stationery, office supplies, sports equipment, musical instruments and computer products alongside books in today’s stores.

The bookshop came out of a magazine and a newspaper. English Wikipedia says Ojong and Oetama launched the magazine Intisari on 17 August 1963 and the national daily Kompas on 28 June 1965; Indonesian Wikipedia treats the Intisari launch as the founding date of the whole group, now called Kompas Gramedia. The Gramedia name soon spread beyond the shop. In 1972 the group set up a printing plant in Jakarta, PT Gramedia, to serve its newspapers and magazines, and in 1973 it formed the book publisher Gramedia Pustaka Utama, according to English Wikipedia.

The chain itself is run by PT Gramedia Asri Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Kompas Gramedia that English Wikipedia describes as the group’s retail distribution channel, which also handles foreign publishers and partners. In the 1980s the group strengthened its publishing line, English Wikipedia says, adding houses whose books fill the shelves: Elex Media Komputindo, founded in 1985 for books on computers and electronics as well as comics, and Grasindo, which from 1990 concentrated on school textbooks.

The chain grew store by store across the country. As of 2023 Gramedia had about 120 branches in 33 Indonesian cities, according to English Wikipedia. Its online selling started early: The Jakarta Post reported in January 2019 that Gramedia had been online since 1996 with a catalogue and non-book items, and began selling books by e-commerce in 2007. The company’s own Gramedia.com pages give 2009 as the start of its online store, then part of the Matraman branch in Jakarta, and say the site has been run by PT Gramedia Asri Media since 2016.

Chambers, a festival and Jalma.

Gramedia’s current look dates from 9 May 2015, when it launched a new store concept and a new logo, according to English and Indonesian Wikipedia. The concept, called “New Experience,” divides a store into rooms, or “chambers,” built around different themes, and it was tried first at the Gramedia branch in Central Park, Jakarta. The new mark is a logotype pairing a letter G with the word “Gramedia.”

The chain also uses events to bring readers in. The Jakarta Post reported in October 2018 on Gramedia’s first Readers Fest, held from 1 to 7 October at Kota Tua, the old town of West Jakarta. The week-long programme mixed writing and drawing workshops, a zine-making workshop, a large book market and musical guests; around 7,000 people had visited within five days, the paper said, and the festival coincided with the launch of a new Gramedia mobile app.

In 2019 the same paper described Gramedia’s approach as “omnichannel.” A company spokesperson told the Post that customers could order books online and collect them in a store, or order in a store a title it did not stock and have it delivered home. More than 60,000 titles were then on sale across its shops and website, the paper reported.

The newest format is Gramedia Jalma. The Weekender, the lifestyle title of The Jakarta Post, wrote in March 2026 that Gramedia had opened Jalma in Melawai, in the Blok M area of South Jakarta, in July 2025, as a more relaxed, public-facing store with a stronger emphasis on international literature. English Wikipedia says the name comes from a Sundanese and Javanese word meaning “human,” and that the format gives more room to community areas, creator collaboration areas and interior design than a conventional branch, with book clubs, seminars and art exhibitions. The Weekender piece notes that young readers come to Jalma to read as a group, and links the store to Gramedia’s Water Lily Literary brand, which focuses on imported titles.

How bookshop chains present themselves.

Bookshop chains in Europe and Asia tend to present themselves through places before products. Many keep one older or larger shop at the centre of their story, a flagship on a named street that appears in their histories, their photographs and often their anniversaries. In Lisbon, Bertrand’s Chiado shop on Rua Garrett plays that part; in Madrid, Casa del Libro’s building on the Gran Vía does the same. For a design reader, the flagship is where a chain’s colours, signs and lettering are seen at their largest.

Inside the shops, the companies describe spaces for reading and meeting as much as shelves. Chains publish details of rooms for book launches and talks, children’s sections and floors given over to single subjects, and some describe places where visitors can sit with a book. These spaces are part of how a bookseller explains what it is for, and they usually carry the same signs and colours as the shop floor.

Most large chains now run loyalty or members’ programmes and an online shop alongside the physical stores. Membership cards, members’ areas on a website and online marketplaces are described by the companies themselves, and the scale of such programmes is checked in these guides against dated press reports rather than marketing pages. Store and imprint naming is usually plain: many chains carry a founder’s surname, a city, or a simple description of a house of books, and a publishing imprint may sit under the same group as the shops.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, owners, listings and the publishing groups that sit behind many chains. Ownership often changes more often than the shop signs do, so the guides in this series date each change of owner to an independent source, describe each name and colour as documented, and treat the palettes shown here as unofficial interpretations.

One name for a shop, a printer and publishers.

Gramedia’s identity is a retail one built on its parent’s name. The bookshop chain, the printing plant and several publishers all carry “Gramedia,” and the group itself, Kompas Gramedia, joins the names of its newspaper and its book business. English Wikipedia lists the bookshop chain among the group’s businesses next to the Kompas daily, the Kompas TV network, the Sonora radio network and the Santika hotel chain. Indonesian Wikipedia uses the single word “Gramedia” to point to several group companies, from the bookshop chain to the publishers Gramedia Pustaka Utama, Grasindo and Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.

The name now covers more than paper. Gramedia.com sells stationery and office supplies next to books, and the company says the site is linked to more than 100 Gramedia stores, so orders can ship from branches across Indonesia. The Jakarta Post reported in 2019 that the chain saw its shops and website as working together rather than as rivals.

For a design guide, Gramedia shows how one name can run across a bookshop chain, a printer and a family of publishers inside a media group. Compare Kinokuniya, the Japanese chain that The Jakarta Post reported opening new Jakarta branches in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and MPH Bookstores in neighbouring Malaysia. For this guide we use an ink blue, a warm paper and a teal with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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