London, 1982.

BBH is a set of initials that stands for three people. The Guardian reported on 5 July 2012, in an article by Mark Sweney, that the agency was founded in London in 1982 by John Bartle, Nigel Bogle and John Hegarty. English Wikipedia gives the founding place as Soho and the full name as Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and the agency’s own website still signs itself with the three surnames, while the short form BBH is the one used on its typefaces, its offices and its new identity.

The sign of the agency came from its first piece of work. English Wikipedia says the agency’s first ad was for Levi’s and showed a black sheep going against the herd, and that the image became the agency’s icon. It’s Nice That, in a report by Paul Moore on 26 February 2026, described the same ad as a Levi’s poster for black jeans showing a sole black sheep in a flock of white sheep. The agency’s own About page puts it in three short lines: a Levi’s ad in 1982, a single black sheep going its own way, and “That’s how BBH started.”

The sheep also gave the agency its motto. English Wikipedia says the poster spawned the phrase “When the world zigs, zag”, and It’s Nice That called the line the singular mantra under which the agency has operated since 1982. The agency’s website opens with the same words today, set across the top of its About page.

The founders tied the sheep to the company’s values in their own words. In the Guardian report of 2012, Nigel Bogle spoke of the values “characterised by the black sheep”, and the newspaper explained in brackets that the black sheep is the agency logo. Levi’s itself stayed with the agency for a long time: The Guardian reported on 15 July 2010, again by Mark Sweney, that Bogle had described Levi’s as a founding client that BBH London won in 1982, and that the relationship had run for 28 years.

From a Levi’s poster to a Paris group.

The Levi’s account produced a long run of films. The Guardian’s 2010 report named the launderette ad of 1985, featuring Nick Kamen, and the puppet Flat Eric, pictured in a Levi’s ad of 1999, among the work of those years. The same report said BBH lost the US Levi’s business to Wieden & Kennedy in Portland in 2008 after declining to repitch, that its last European work for the brand was “Secrets and lies” in 2008, and that BBH resigned the rest of the account in July 2010. Bogle and Levi’s issued a joint statement, and the newspaper reported that the two sides parted on good terms.

Ownership changed in two steps. English Wikipedia says Leo Burnett bought a minority share in BBH in 1997. The Guardian reported in 2012 that Publicis Groupe took that stake in 2002 as part of its purchase of Bcom3, the holding company that owned Leo Burnett. On 5 July 2012 the newspaper reported that Publicis had acquired the remaining shares from Bogle and Hegarty and so taken full control of the agency. Publicis Groupe has owned the whole of BBH since 2012.

The 2012 deal came with new names at the top. The Guardian said Bogle and Hegarty would step back from running the business while staying active on client accounts, that Simon Sherwood would become group chairman, that Gwyn Jones, who had joined in the agency’s first graduate intake in 1987, would become group chief executive, and that Hegarty had appointed Alexandre Gama of Neogama/BBH in Brazil to succeed him as worldwide chief creative officer. The newspaper named Neil Munn, chief executive of the brand ventures company Zag, as group chief operating officer. English Wikipedia dates the launch of Zag, a branding and venturing division whose name comes from the agency’s motto, to 2006.

The Guardian list of the agency’s ads also included Audi’s “Vorsprung durch Technik”. Today the agency’s website lists offices in Dublin, London, Mumbai, New York, Shanghai and Singapore, alongside units for B2B, health and studio work.

A sheep, a zag and three surnames.

An advertising agency is in the odd position of selling identity work while needing one of its own. Many agency names are simply the founders’ surnames joined together, sometimes with an ampersand, a plus sign or a slash, and over time those strings are often shortened to initials. That shortening is itself a design decision: a run of capitals reads as a mark rather than a list of people, and it survives the departure of the partners whose names it holds.

Other agencies pick a single word, an animal or a punctuation mark as the anchor, and let the typography do the rest. Because an agency rarely has a product on a shelf, its identity lives on surfaces that are easy to overlook: the reception wall, the office building and its signage, the credentials deck, the business card, the “about” page and, above all, the website, which is often rebuilt more often than the logo. For a designer studying these brands, the useful questions are how the name is set, how the mark behaves when it is shortened or extended for a new office, and how much of the agency’s self-promotion borrows the tone of the work it makes for clients.

A first new identity in 44 years.

In February 2026 the agency changed its look for the first time in its history. It’s Nice That reported on 26 February 2026 that BBH had launched a new visual identity, its first in 44 years, made up of a short film, glyphs, motion graphics and three typefaces. The Australian trade site The Stable quoted executive creative director Felipe Serradourada Guimarães saying that the BBH brand had not been touched since 1982.

Each typeface carries a founder’s name. It’s Nice That said the faces were made with Studio Drama, the London type studio behind the Heinz typeface: BBH Bartle is designed for clarity with broad, confident letterforms, BBH Bogle echoes the heavier pen strokes of the original BBH logo, and BBH Hegarty is the unconventional member of the set. Chris Nott, Studio Drama’s co-founder and type director, described the aim as a contemporary British grotesque that respected the agency’s heritage. The magazine said the team made the typefaces open source, and The Stable said they were released as free Google Fonts; the Google Fonts service lists families under the names BBH Sans Bartle, BBH Sans Bogle and BBH Sans Hegarty.

The motto became a shape. It’s Nice That said the team defined the form of the zag after hundreds of scribbles, then built it in CGI so that it could take any texture, from a melted shopping trolley for Tesco to a Magnum ice cream; Sophie Harper led the 3D work and Oded Shein the motion language, made in Cavalry and After Effects. BBH Hegarty also carries custom “zag” glyphs, and design director Adam Buckland told the magazine that the team made the typeface free so that other designers could use it to find their own difference. The project took two years, the magazine said, with motion and 3D done in-house.

The sheep came back too. The Stable said the launch included a 44-second film by the artist filmmaker Gilly Booth, shot with a flock of heritage Radnor sheep in Pembrokeshire as a homage to the original Levi’s ad, and black fleeces for staff with “BBH” embroidered on the pocket and a small yellow sheep ID tag clipped on the hem.

For a design guide, BBH shows how one image from a first poster can serve as logo, motto and typeface brief for more than four decades, with the founders’ surnames carried from the door into the letterforms. Compare Levi’s, the founding client whose black-jeans poster gave the agency its sheep, and Publicis, the Paris group that has owned BBH since 2012. For this guide we use fleece black, wool white and tag yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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