A bond terminal before a brand name.

Bloomberg did not start under its founder’s name. In 1981, after leaving the investment bank Salomon Brothers, Michael Bloomberg co-founded Innovative Market Systems, or IMS, with former Salomon colleagues Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan and Charles Zegar, IEEE Spectrum reported in a history of the terminal published in September 2026. Bloomberg had built computerised financial systems at Salomon and believed Wall Street would pay for specialised financial data combined with instant analysis.

The product came before the brand. IMS proposed a single system that would bring together market data and the calculations traders were doing by hand. Its Market Master terminal, IEEE Spectrum wrote, consisted of a monochrome CRT monitor, a custom keyboard and a communications unit linked to the company’s own private network. At launch it offered United States government bond prices and bond-calculation tools. Its launch client was Merrill Lynch, which took an equity stake in the company and took delivery of Market Master terminals in 1982; Merrill waived its exclusive rights to the terminals in 1984.

The name followed. Five years after the launch, IEEE Spectrum says, IMS rebranded as Bloomberg LP and the Market Master became known as the Bloomberg Terminal; Wikipedia dates the renaming to 1986. From then on the founder’s surname did the work of the brand: one word for the company, the machine, and the news and media businesses built around it.

Those businesses came in steps, according to Wikipedia. Bloomberg launched Bloomberg Business News, later Bloomberg News, in 1990, with Matthew Winkler as editor-in-chief, to supply reporting to terminal users; bloomberg.com followed on 29 September 1993. Television, radio and magazines were added later, all under the same name.

The Chiclet and the colour-coded keys.

The terminal’s look began with its keyboard. According to IEEE Spectrum, the Bloomberg keyboard was designed with traders and analysts in mind: the function keys were colour-coded and labelled with what they did, so that users did not have to memorise commands. The original keyboard, introduced around 1983 and hand-assembled, was known as “the Chiclet.” Hot keys called up data on government securities, corporate debt and currency markets, and a series of keystrokes could pull up historical and live data, run an analysis or place a trade.

The hardware kept changing. A cable ran from the keyboard to the Bloomberg Controller, which had a dedicated telephone line to a local hub, because the company had built its own closed network before the internet was commercially available. In 1990 Bloomberg added a trackball to the keyboard to move around the windows and menus on screen; two years later the keyboard gained a built-in speaker, with telephone, headphone and microphone jacks. In the early 2000s, IEEE Spectrum says, a fingerprint reader was added for logging in. Keyboards from the terminal’s history are held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

On screen, information was presented mostly in tables, and learning to read it became a rite of passage for users, IEEE Spectrum wrote. The terminal’s look is less a logo than an environment: dense data, a dark screen and keys whose colours tell the user what each one does. Bloomberg has kept that combination of a working tool and a single name at the centre of the company, with the news, television and magazine brands arranged around it.

For a designer, the terminal shows Bloomberg’s identity being made from function. The colour on the keys exists to speed up a task; the name on the machine is simply the founder’s surname.

News agencies and their marks.

A news brand is read before it is understood. The nameplate of a newspaper — the title set across the top of the front page — and the masthead of a magazine do the work a logo does elsewhere, but they sit above a page that changes every day or every issue, so they have to stay recognisable at any size and beside any headline. Many newspaper nameplates keep an engraved or blackletter look that recalls the age of metal type, while magazine mastheads tend to move more freely between redesigns.

Behind the nameplate sits the house typeface: the headline and text families that give every story the same voice. Some publishers commission their own type; others license and adapt existing families. On screens the identity shrinks again, into the app icon and favicon, where a single initial or monogram often has to carry the whole name. Reading these brands means looking at all three layers together — nameplate, type and icon — and noticing which details survive each change of format.

Businessweek, Helvetica and the grid.

Bloomberg’s print design took shape through an acquisition. The company bought the weekly BusinessWeek from McGraw-Hill in 2009, according to Wikipedia, and renamed it Bloomberg Businessweek. Eye magazine, in an interview by Simon Esterson published in its Summer 2011 issue, set out what followed: Bloomberg installed Josh Tyrangiel, formerly of Time, as editor, and relaunched the magazine in April 2010, hiring Richard Turley from London as creative director. Turley had been art editor of The Guardian’s G2 section.

Turley told Eye that early online critics called the redesign “too gridded,” and that the structure of the magazine was indebted to the grid and type philosophy he had learned working for Mark Porter at The Guardian. He chose Helvetica, he said, because he wanted a typeface that was simply a typeface rather than a branding exercise. On top of that structure his designers added pictures, display type, big numbers, charts and illustration, many of them placed free of the grid — a process Turley described as “graffiti-ing the pages.” Editors and designers sat side by side, and the charts were made by a graphics team working with Bloomberg’s reporters and data.

Ownership has stayed in one place. Bloomberg L.P. has been privately held since its founding, with Michael Bloomberg as majority owner, and in 2008 Merrill Lynch agreed to sell its remaining stake back to the company, Wikipedia says. The headquarters is at 731 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

The pieces of the identity sit side by side rather than in one mark: a founder’s surname, a terminal recognised by its screen and colour-coded keyboard, and a magazine whose 2010 relaunch made the grid and a neutral sans part of the Bloomberg name in print.

For a design guide, Bloomberg shows how a working tool and a magazine can carry one name in different registers. Compare Financial Times, another business title. For this guide we use black and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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