An Post Brand Guidelines: The 1984 State Post, the GPO & a Lowercase Wordmark

A 1983 Act, a 1984 start and an older postal history.

An Post, Irish for “The Post”, began operating on 1 January 1984. It was set up under the Postal and Telecommunications Services Act 1983, which the Irish Statute Book dates to 13 July 1983 and which provided for the establishment of An Post and Bord Telecom Éireann. On that basis the post office services of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, the government department that had run them since 1924, were divided between the new postal company and the telecoms operator Telecom Éireann, which English Wikipedia notes was renamed Eircom after its privatisation in 1999 and Eir in 2015.

The postal service itself is much older. English Wikipedia, citing Stephen Ferguson’s The Post Office in Ireland: An Illustrated History (2016), gives the appointment of Evan Vaughan as postmaster in Dublin in 1638 as the date generally accepted for the start of a semi-formal postal system in Ireland. A Postal Act of 1657 created a combined General Post Office for Ireland, Scotland and England, and the Post Office Act of 1660 confirmed it. Until 1922 Irish mail used British stamps, and items from that period are identified by their Irish postmarks.

The building most closely tied to the Irish post is the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin. Designed by the architect Francis Johnston, it had its foundation stone laid on 12 August 1814 and opened on 6 January 1818, English Wikipedia says. Its portico of six Ionic columns is of Portland stone and the rest of the front of mountain granite, and three statues by John Smyth stand on the pediment: Mercury, Fidelity and Hibernia with her harp. During the Easter Rising of 1916 the GPO served as the headquarters of the rising’s leaders, and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic was read outside it on 24 April 1916. The building was destroyed by fire except for its granite facade, and it was rebuilt by the Irish Free State government and reopened in 1929.

Stamps in Irish, a cancellation mark and a lowercase name.

Stamps carry much of the Irish post’s visual history. From 17 February 1922, English Wikipedia records, British stamps were overprinted with Irish text: first “Rialtas Sealadach na hÉireann 1922”, for the Provisional Government of Ireland, and from 11 December 1922 “Saorstát Éireann”, for the Irish Free State, in a three-line sans-serif setting. The first stamp designed for Ireland was a two-pence value showing a map of the island. Commemorative stamps followed from 1929, and the name of the state on stamps has nearly always been written in Irish, mostly as Éire. Between 1922 and 1984 stamps were issued by Oifig an Phoist, the Irish Post Office section of the Department; since 1984 An Post has issued them.

The company’s own mark has changed once since 1984. English Wikipedia describes the first logo as the word “post” beside a wavy cancellation-mark icon, and says the current logo was adopted on 14 December 2018 and first appeared on 13 March 2019; in recent signage the name is set in lowercase as “an post”. Branches are signed Oifig an Phoist or “Post Office”, with the words run together and part of each set in bold. In 2003 a new post office division rebranded the branches with a white-and-red “Post Office” logo, a change English Wikipedia says was largely reversed in 2005, when the An Post logo returned to post offices.

Beyond letters and parcels, the An Post name sits on a wide range of services. English Wikipedia lists deposit accounts, Express Post, EMS international express mail and the collection of television licence fees on behalf of the state; GeoDirectory, a database of buildings and addresses run jointly with Ordnance Survey Ireland; and AddressPal, a parcel-forwarding service launched in 2017 for shoppers buying from the UK and the US. A banking venture, Postbank, was launched with Fortis in 2007 and wound down by the end of 2010. Ireland’s postcode system, Eircode, came into use on 13 July 2015.

How postal operators present themselves.

Postal operators are among the oldest names a country carries. Many began as royal or state services centuries ago and became companies only in recent decades, and their identities often hold on to symbols from that past while the business shifts from letters to parcels. Colour does much of the work: red, yellow, blue and orange wordmarks appear on post boxes, vans, uniforms and counters, and a colour can outlast the institution that first chose it. Denmark’s postal service wore red and yellow even before it was nationalised in 1711, and Sweden’s has used a post horn with a crown since its foundation in 1636, according to English Wikipedia.

The symbols repeat across borders. Post horns appear in several European marks; envelopes, birds in flight and arrows suggest movement elsewhere. Names matter too. Many operators use the national name in the local language, or in two or three languages at once, and some now trade under a group name that sits above the post office itself.

Their public faces have changed with the work. Websites now lead with parcels, tracking and delivery options, then letters and stamps and, for some operators, payments, money transfers or banking. Parcel lockers, service points inside shops, delivery vans and counter photography have become as common in their imagery as the post box. Stamp issues remain a design programme of their own, with commemorative sets and products for collectors, and philately keeps older issues in view.

Most of these operators are state-owned, or were until recently, so laws, annual reports and press releases are the main record of their ownership and structure. This guide sets out what those records and independent press say about each operator’s history, ownership and visual habits, and marks the companies’ own claims as theirs.

From the GPO to the docklands.

For almost a century the GPO was also the headquarters of the Irish post, and it remains An Post’s registered office. On 22 June 2023, RTÉ News reported, An Post moved about 900 staff from the building to five leased floors of the 17-storey EXO Building in Dublin’s docklands, saying the GPO offices, last refurbished in 1985, were “not appropriate for a modern logistics company”. The post office counter in the GPO stayed open. When the new headquarters was officially opened on 6 July 2023, TheJournal reported that the GPO would continue as a post office and museum; the GPO Witness History visitor centre on the 1916 Rising had opened there in March 2016, English Wikipedia says.

The same RTÉ report drew on An Post’s annual report for 2022: letter volumes fell by 5.9 per cent, parcel business was 21 per cent higher than in 2021, and the company had 10,104 staff at the end of the year. An Post remains wholly owned by the Government of Ireland and is organised as a designated activity company, according to English Wikipedia.

For a design guide, An Post shows how a postal brand can be bilingual by default, with Irish names on its stamps, its branches and the company itself, while its historic headquarters building carries a national history of its own. Compare Royal Mail, its neighbour across the Irish Sea, and PostNL. For this guide we use a deep green, a soft paper white and a warm stone grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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