Georges Claude’s air-liquefaction work and Paul Delorme’s company of November 1902.

Air Liquide’s name is a plain description of its starting point. In French the words mean “liquid air”, and English Wikipedia gives that literal translation at the head of its article on the company. French Wikipedia adds that the group was formerly called L’Air liquide, with the definite article, and that it is also known by the initials AL, the two letters that later became its monogram.

The process came before the company. English and French Wikipedia both record that on 25 May 1902, after two years of research, Georges Claude perfected a method of liquefying air in order to separate its components, oxygen, nitrogen and argon. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on L’Air Liquide reprinted by FundingUniverse, says Claude had received his diploma from the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris in 1889, and that between 1896 and 1902 he worked as a chemist at the Compagnie Française Houston-Thomson, where he had studied the handling of acetylene.

The company came next, and it was the work of a second man. The same directory describes Paul Delorme as Claude’s former schoolmate and colleague at Houston-Thomson, and says Delorme persuaded his friend Frédéric Gallier to match his own contribution to Claude’s research. French Wikipedia records that on 8 November 1902 Delorme gathered a group of subscribers, mainly engineers, to back the project, and became president of a company with a long descriptive title: “L’Air liquide, société pour l’étude et l’exploitation des procédés Georges Claude”, a company for the study and exploitation of Georges Claude’s processes. The founder’s surname was written into the legal name from the start.

French Wikipedia also names two engineers who helped turn the method into an industrial one. It says Delorme contacted René Lévy, who with André Helbronner had developed an improvement on Claude’s process that made industrial operation practical. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the start of oxygen production to 1908, and notes that another of Claude’s lines of work, neon lighting, appeared on the streets of Paris in 1910.

Presidents, listings and a research centre named after the founders.

The company moved abroad within a few years of its founding. French Wikipedia lists the sequence: Belgium in 1906, then Japan in 1907, Spain and Italy in 1909, and Canada in 1911, where René Lévy set up a subsidiary, followed by Hong Kong. On 20 February 1913, both language editions of Wikipedia record, L’Air liquide was introduced to the Paris Bourse, the exchange where its shares still trade.

Leadership stayed in one family for much of the twentieth century. French Wikipedia’s list of successive heads gives Paul Delorme from 1902 to 1945 and his son Jean Delorme from 1945 to 1985. They were followed by Édouard de Royère from 1985 to 1995 and Alain Joly from 1995 to 2001, after which Joly chaired a supervisory board while Benoît Potier led the management board until 2006. Potier then held the top post until 2022, when François Jackow took over.

The two founders’ names were joined again in a building. English Wikipedia records that in 1970 the company opened its Claude-Delorme research and development centre at Les Loges-en-Josas, in the Yvelines department west of Paris. In September 2018, the same article says, Air Liquide opened its Paris Innovation Campus on the Plateau de Saclay, south of the capital.

The company’s name also travelled into other fields through its subsidiaries. English and French Wikipedia record that in 1946 Air Liquide founded La Spirotechnique, a company that designed and sold diving regulators and other diving equipment, and that it launched a regulator called the CG45 the same year. Air Liquide’s head office is in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, according to English Wikipedia.

Through all of this the wording stayed the same. Whether set as L’Air liquide, Air liquide or Air Liquide, the name has always described the substance the company was built to make rather than a person or a place, and it remains in French.

Industrial company names and their marks.

European industrial identities tend to be built from plain materials. Many company names began as a founder’s surname, the name of a town or river, or an acronym left behind when two firms merged and kept a trace of each. Those names were rarely chosen for sound or meaning; they were registered, painted on a works gate and stamped into metal, and they stayed because changing them would have meant changing every plate, invoice and drawing at once.

That history shapes how the marks look today. A wordmark that has to be cast into a pump housing, etched onto a switch plate or printed on a shipping crate needs simple letterforms, generous spacing and a single colour that survives grime, paint and sunlight. Symbols are often abstract shapes or stylised initials rather than pictures, because they must read at the size of a thumbnail on a control panel and at the size of a building on a factory roof.

The brand surfaces are mostly physical: product plates, machine liveries, signage at plant gates, vehicle fleets, trade-fair stands and the technical manuals that travel with the equipment. Reviewing one of these identities means looking at where the mark is actually fixed, not only at the version on a screen.

A new logo after the Airgas acquisition, announced in January 2017.

The latest change to the mark followed a large acquisition in the United States. English Wikipedia records that Air Liquide completed its purchase of the American company Airgas on 23 May 2016. The trade title gasworld, in a report by Jemima Owen-Jones on 12 January 2017, said that following the Airgas acquisition and the launch of its NEOS company programme for 2016 to 2020, Air Liquide had decided it was time to change its visual identity with a new logo.

The report set out what changed and what did not. According to gasworld, the company kept its brand fundamentals, which it listed as the name, the colour code and the construction of the logo. What went was the AL monogram. In its place came a new brand sign called the “Alpha”, which the company said stood for the beginning of a new phase. Air Liquide described the precision of the Alpha as echoing its scientific culture, and said the roundness of the sign and the lower-case typeface were meant to convey closeness to the people it works with. It also removed the frame that had surrounded the logo, a change it presented as a sign of openness.

The new logo was linked to an existing line. gasworld reported that Air Liquide called the identity a logical extension of its “Creative Oxygen” signature, launched in 2014, in which oxygen stood for the company’s expertise and creativity for its teams. Chairman and chief executive Benoît Potier said the identity marked the beginning of a new phase in the group’s history, and the company launched a communication campaign under the hashtag #AirLiquideistransforming, focused on digital and social media.

The 2017 change sits within a long line of continuity. The name chosen in 1902 still describes the company’s product, the founders’ names survive on the research centre opened in 1970, and the monogram built from the initials AL gave way to a single sign that the company named after the Greek letter alpha.

For a design guide, Air Liquide shows how a company can keep its name, colours and logo construction fixed while replacing the symbol at the centre of the mark, and how a brand line can prepare the ground for that change. Compare Saint-Gobain, another French industrial group with a long history in Paris, and BASF, a chemicals company known by its initials. For this guide we use oxygen blue, deep cylinder blue and frost with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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