A consulting arm, a split and an arbitration.

Accenture is a coined name, and it exists because an older name had to be given up. According to Wikipedia, the business began in the early 1950s as the business and technology consulting division of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. One of its early projects was a feasibility study for General Electric about installing a computer at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, which led to GE’s installation of a UNIVAC I.

For decades the consultants worked under the Andersen name. In 1989, Wikipedia says, Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting became separate units of Andersen Worldwide Société Coopérative, a Swiss coordinating entity. The New York Times, in an International Herald Tribune report dated 8 August 2000, described the same history: Andersen Consulting had been split from the accounting arm in 1989 to give it more freedom, with Andersen Worldwide meant to oversee the two, and in 1997 Andersen Consulting sought to end the link, saying Arthur Andersen had breached intercompany agreements by expanding into consulting.

The dispute went to arbitration. The Times report said an arbitrator appointed by the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, Guillermo Gamba, had largely ruled in favour of Andersen Consulting, finding that the parent organisation had failed to coordinate the activities of its two arms. One consequence was decisive for the brand: the accounting concern would end up with the Andersen name. Joe Forehand, chief executive of Andersen Consulting, called the decision a total win and said the company had already been considering a name change. An editor at Accounting Today quoted in the same report wondered how important the Andersen name would prove to the consultants.

That question was answered within months. On 1 January 2001, Wikipedia says, Andersen Consulting adopted the name Accenture. The word was derived from the phrase “accent on the future”, and it was submitted by Kim Petersen, a Danish employee in the company’s Oslo office, who hoped that a word without an existing meaning would not cause offence in any country where the firm worked.

The accent mark and its 2017 redesign.

The name carried its own visual cue. “Accent” is in the word, and before 2017 the wordmark included a small greater-than sign that, in Brand New’s description, read tastefully as an accent. That earlier wordmark was set in Rotis, a typeface whose particular forms of “c” and “e” suited a name with a doubled “c” and repeated “e”, Armin Vit wrote.

In February 2017 Accenture changed that wordmark. Brand New noted the new logo and identity on 16 February 2017. Armin Vit wrote that he had never been a great admirer of Rotis, but that Accenture’s logo was one place where it worked, because of those particular letters. The new logo, he wrote, dropped Rotis for a plainer neo-grotesque sans in the family of Univers or Neue Haas Unica, and he noted that the firm used Graphik on its website, although the wordmark was not exactly that face. In his view the change cost the mark much of its character.

The greater-than sign moved in the other direction. Vit wrote that it had been made larger, so that it read less like an accent and more like an icon, and that it had taken on new jobs: used large and with colourful gradients, the symbol framed text and content across the firm’s messaging, which he judged the more interesting part of the redesign, seen to good effect on the website. He noted that there was no official case study, and that his account was assembled from what the firm had published on its site and social media.

In that reading, the 2017 change moved weight from the letters to the symbol. The wordmark became plainer, while the greater-than sign, enlarged and coloured, became the element the firm used to frame headlines and content in its own communications.

Partner names, initials and restrained marks.

Professional-services identities tend to be built from a short list of raw materials. The earliest is the partner’s surname: many advisory and accounting firms began as the name of one or two founders on a brass plate, and that surname often survives long after the founders have left, because clients and regulators already know it. When firms combine, the name usually grows by addition, with surnames joined by ampersands, and then shrinks again as the string becomes unwieldy. Initialisms are the common end point, turning a row of names into two, three or four letters that fit a business card, a building sign and a browser tab.

Mergers and separations also force renames. A firm that splits from a former parent, or that must stop using a name it no longer owns, sometimes coins a new word instead of reusing a surname, and that coined word then has to earn meaning through use. The visual side is usually restrained: a wordmark set in a sober serif or sans, one corporate colour used consistently, and a small graphic accent such as a dot, a bar or a typographic mark that stands in for a symbol. Redesigns in this field often adjust spacing, weight and colour rather than replacing the name, so continuity is part of the message.

Bermuda, Dublin and a listed company.

The rename came just before Accenture became a public company. Wikipedia says the firm was incorporated in Bermuda in 2001, and its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2001. In May 2009 Accenture announced that its board had approved moving its place of incorporation from Bermuda to Ireland, and the company, Accenture plc, now gives Dublin as its headquarters.

The timing of the split shaped what followed for both names. Arthur Andersen kept the Andersen name after the 2000 arbitration, and in 2002, Wikipedia records, the accounting firm was prosecuted in the United States in connection with the Enron scandal; Accenture was by then a separate company. Wikipedia says that because of the split from Andersen, Accenture avoided that prosecution; the consulting business no longer carried the Andersen surname by then.

Since the rename the firm has organised itself into a small number of business segments, and some of those carry sub-brands of their own. Its marketing and creative arm, Wikipedia says, is now called Accenture Song, after earlier operating as Accenture Interactive.

Accenture’s identity is a useful counterpoint to its surname-based peers. Where many professional firms carry the names of partners, Accenture’s name was manufactured to be neutral across languages, and its graphic accent was built into the word from the start. Its 2017 redesign, as Brand New described it, kept that accent and gave it a larger role.

For a design guide, Accenture shows how a coined name can be given a visual hook that does the explaining, and how that hook can grow from an accent into a system. Compare Deloitte, a professional-services name built from a founder’s surname, and Financial Times, a business brand with its own colour signature. For this guide we use violet, a deep plum and a lilac tint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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