From the letters S.O. to Esso, Enco and Humble.

The Exxon name was coined to solve a trademark problem. Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), known in the trade as Jersey Standard, was one of the companies left standing after the 1911 break-up of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and it sold petrol under the name Esso — the sound of the initials S and O. English Wikipedia, citing the Esso history pages and Encyclopædia Britannica, dates the company’s use of the Esso name to 1926. The Handbook of Texas Online, in an entry by James A. Clark and Mark Odintz last revised in 2015, records that the other Standard Oil companies objected to Esso being used as a brand name for Jersey Standard’s products in their own territories. CSP Daily News reported in February 2016 that a court injunction, established in 1938 according to its account, had barred the company from using the Esso mark in a group of mostly Midwestern and Plains states.

The Texas half of the story is Humble. The Handbook of Texas says the Humble Oil Company was chartered in Texas in February 1911 and reorganised on 21 June 1917 as the Humble Oil and Refining Company, the result of a collaboration between Ross S. Sterling, Walter William Fondren, Robert L. Blaffer, William Stamps Farish and others. In February 1919, the same entry says, Humble sold half of its stock to Standard Oil of New Jersey, beginning the connection that eventually absorbed it. English Wikipedia adds that Jersey Standard bought the rest of Humble in September 1959.

By the 1960s the company was selling the same petrol under several names. English Wikipedia’s article on Humble Oil says Humble introduced Enco — short for “Energy Company” — in the summer of 1960 at stations in Ohio, and that Standard Oil of Ohio protested because the new name looked and sounded close to Esso, sharing the same oval sign with a blue border and red letters. Stations in Ohio were rebranded Humble, while the fuels and motor oils kept the Enco name. Depending on the state, a driver could pull into an Esso, an Enco or a Humble station run by one company, with the tagline “Happy Motoring!” over the service bays, Wikipedia says.

The advertising of those years is remembered for a tiger. Wikipedia says the “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” campaign was introduced by Humble in 1959 to promote its Enco and Esso Extra petrols. When it crossed the Atlantic, Time magazine reported on 28 May 1965 that the campaign had become Esso’s all-Europe promotion, translated as “Pack den Tiger in den Tank” in West Germany and “Mettez un tigre dans votre moteur” in France, where “motor” replaced the untranslatable “tank”. Time described miniature tiger tails fluttering from scooters and saloons, pump hoses wrapped in tiger stripes, Dutch station attendants in tiger suits and a German pop song called “Tiger in the Tank”.

One name for the United States, and a merger with Mobil.

The answer to a patchwork of names was a new one. The Handbook of Texas records that in early 1972 Humble and Standard Oil of New Jersey announced that their petrol would be marketed as Exxon, that Jersey Standard would change its name to Exxon Corporation, and that from 1 January 1973 Humble would become Exxon Company, U.S.A. English Wikipedia says the Exxon name and logo were test-marketed in late 1971 and early 1972 at rebranded Enco and Esso stations in selected American cities before stations across the country were converted during the summer and autumn of 1972. The change reached well beyond the roadside sign: Wikipedia lists pumps, product packaging, tankers, delivery trucks and the credit cards mailed to customers.

The logo had been drawn years before it went up. The Library of Congress holds a sheet from the sketchbook of the industrial designer Raymond Loewy, catalogued as a design drawing for a logo for the Exxon Corporation and made in marker on tracing paper in 1966. The Library, which bought the sheet in 1990, says it shows the trials and rejections as Loewy created a new logo for Standard Oil Company, with his final choice marked “okay”. English Wikipedia’s article on Loewy credits him with the Exxon logo, designed in 1966 and introduced in 1972, alongside logos for Shell and the former BP mark.

Esso did not disappear. Wikipedia says the Exxon brand is used in the United States market, while the Esso trademark remains in use across Europe, Canada, Asia and Latin America; in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands the Esso name stayed on stations until 2008, when they were sold to Total, as The Virgin Islands Daily News reported in March 2008. At home, the company kept the Esso and Standard marks alive in its old eastern territory by selling Esso-branded diesel, Wikipedia says. CSP Daily News reported in February 2016 that a court had lifted the old injunction after Exxon Mobil argued, in a filing made the previous December, that the public no longer associated the Esso mark with Standard Oil.

The second big change came with Mobil, the former Standard Oil Company of New York. English Wikipedia says the two companies agreed to merge in 1998 and that the deal closed on 30 November 1999, with Exxon as the surviving company buying Mobil and the combined name joining both trade names. The two station brands carried on side by side: Wikipedia says Mobil is the main retail brand in California, Florida, New York, New England, the Great Lakes and the Midwest, and Exxon is the main brand in the rest of the country. The Houston Chronicle reported on 31 January 2022 that the company would move its headquarters from Irving, near Dallas, to its campus in Spring, north of Houston, which Wikipedia names as its base today.

Design and documentation.

A fuel brand is met mostly at the roadside, and much of its identity is built for people moving at speed. The canopy over the pumps is a large branded surface, carrying a band of colour and a name or mark along its edge so that it reads from the road and at night under its own lights.

The tall sign at the entrance, often called a price pylon or price sign, does two jobs: it carries the brand’s mark at the top and a set of changeable figures below it. In a brand system the mark and the frame stay fixed while the figures change, so the sign is designed around the space the numbers will take.

At the pump itself the brand appears again on toppers, panels and nozzle labels, at a scale meant for someone standing beside the car. Forecourt colour ties these pieces together: the same hues on canopy, pumps, kiosk and sign let a station read as one place from a distance.

Each guide looks at how one name has carried its mark across those surfaces, who has owned it and how its signs have changed, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

A coined word for a single country.

The Exxon identity began with a legal problem rather than a visual one. Esso was a sound made from two initials; Enco was an abbreviation; Humble was a town in Texas. Exxon was chosen as a single name that the company could use in every state, and the Handbook of Texas places the decision in a period when the other Standard Oil companies were objecting to Esso in their territories. The result is a brand that exists in one country while its sister name, Esso, carries the same company’s petrol across much of the rest of the world.

The Library of Congress drawing shows that the identity was a designer’s decision as much as a lawyer’s. Loewy’s sheet sets out alternatives for one mark, with the chosen version marked “okay”. It is part of the material from his files that the Library holds, and it appears in the Reason section of the Library’s American Treasures exhibition.

The tiger outlived the names it was made for. English Wikipedia says tiger imagery can still be seen on the pumps of ExxonMobil, and records that in Britain the 1960s campaign produced faux tiger tails with ribbons for tying under a petrol cap, while a separate run of British television advertising for Esso Blue paraffin featured an animated, bowler-hatted salesman called Joe. Wikipedia also says the Esso name returned to small station signs at both Exxon and Mobil stations after the 2016 court ruling, so the old name now sits beside the one created to replace it.

Ownership has been settled for a quarter of a century. ExxonMobil has owned the Exxon brand since the merger closed in 1999, running it next to Mobil in the United States and Esso abroad, and the company that began as Jersey Standard is now based outside Houston, close to where Humble began.

For a design guide, Exxon shows how a name coined to end a trademark dispute, paired with a logo settled by hand on a single sheet of tracing paper, can carry a company through a national rebrand and a merger while the older names stay in use around it. Compare it with Mobil, its partner brand under the same owner, and Shell, another forecourt mark credited to Loewy. For this guide we use signal red, deep navy and tiger orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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