Carlsberg’s flowing green wordmark carries Danish brewing history — recently, carefully redrawn.

Carlsberg’s identity is the flowing “Carlsberg” script — custom lettering, not an off-the-shelf font — paired with a crown and a hop-leaf emblem, all in the brand’s signature green. The historic script is widely attributed to the Danish artist Thorvald Bindesbøll around 1904. In 2018–2019, a major global rebrand by Taxi Studio (Bristol) carefully redrew the wordmark, crown, hop-leaf and J.C. Jacobsen’s signature and built a bespoke serif system (“Probably Serif,” with lettering artist Tom Lane) — crucially a heritage-faithful redraw, not a font swap. (Two honest caveats: don’t name a commercial typeface for the script, and ignore the occasionally-cited “Poul Holck” attribution, which no source supports.)

Carlsberg was founded in 1847 by J.C. Jacobsen in Copenhagen (on Valby Hill). The name is a small piece of family history: Carl, his son, plus the Danish berg/bjerg (“hill”) — literally “Carl’s hill.” The company’s scientific legacy is extraordinary: the Carlsberg Foundation (1876) ran the Carlsberg Laboratory, where S.P.L. Sørensen devised the pH scale (1909) and Emil Christian Hansen pioneered pure single-cell yeast propagation (1883), yielding the yeast Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. There is also a piece of history the brand handles openly: Carl Jacobsen adopted the swastika — then an ancient good-luck symbol — for Ny Carlsberg in the 1880s (it appears on the Elephant Gate, completed 1901, and on old bottles), and discontinued it through the 1930s, ending its use by 1940 once the symbol had been appropriated by Nazism.

Carlsberg is green, with gold and white. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The signature colour is Carlsberg green — a fresh, confident green tied to the brand for well over a century — supported by gold (the crown, the accents) and white. Green is unusual and ownable in beer, where reds, golds and blues dominate; it gives Carlsberg an instantly distinctive shelf presence and a clean, quality-signalling feel. The honest caveat: Carlsberg publishes no official public brand hex; third-party trackers cite a bright green around #17B169 and a darker corporate green near #00321E, so treat these as approximate. The 2019 rebrand leaned into the green-and-gold heritage, dialling up craft and authenticity rather than reinventing the palette.

The lesson is owning an unexpected colour in your category. By committing to green in a red-and-gold-dominated beer aisle, Carlsberg made its palette a recognition asset in itself — you can spot it before you read it. For designers, it’s a reminder that choosing a colour against category convention (when it fits the brand) can be a powerful differentiator. The takeaways: look at what your category defaults to and consider whether an ownable, contrarian colour could set you apart; commit to it consistently over decades so it becomes shorthand for the brand; and, as always, treat specific hexes as approximate when the official spec isn’t public.

The script is flowing and human — heritage in every stroke.

Carlsberg’s flowing script wordmark is the emotional core of the brand. Attributed to Thorvald Bindesbøll around 1904, the elegant, hand-drawn lettering signals craft, authenticity and more than a century of brewing heritage — a human, artisanal counterpoint to Carlsberg’s industrial scale. When Taxi Studio redrew it in 2018–19, they deliberately preserved that character while refining it for modern use, alongside the bespoke “Probably Serif” — a rebrand that renewed the identity without erasing its history. That restraint is the lesson: the script is too valuable an asset to replace, so it was honoured and modernised, not discarded. (Because it’s custom lettering, the honest description is “a flowing script,” not a named font.) The wordmark still looks hand-made, which is exactly the point.

Carlsberg modernised a heritage identity without throwing its history away.

Carlsberg is a model of evolving a heritage brand without breaking it. Faced with a century-old script, crown, hop-leaf and green palette, the 2018–19 Taxi Studio rebrand chose to redraw and refine rather than replace — honouring Bindesbøll’s lettering, keeping the crown and hop-leaf, retaining the signature green, and adding a bespoke serif system. The result feels contemporary and craft-forward while remaining unmistakably Carlsberg. The brand’s cultural assets reinforce that continuity: the slogan “Probably the best beer in the world” (created in 1973 in the UK, later voiced in famous ads by Orson Welles — the slogan predates his involvement), the Elephant Gate and Elephant Beer, and the science-funding Carlsberg Foundation, which has held majority voting control since J.C. Jacobsen’s death in 1887.

For designers, Carlsberg offers a clear lesson in heritage brand stewardship. The takeaways: when a brand owns valuable, recognisable assets — a distinctive script, a signature colour, a century of history — the job is usually to refine and modernise them, not to start over; a careful redraw can renew relevance while preserving equity and trust. Be honest about the whole history, too: Carlsberg addresses its pre-1940 swastika (an ancient good-luck symbol abandoned once Nazism corrupted it) factually rather than hiding it. And keep the supporting assets — a witty, self-aware slogan like “Probably,” a science foundation, an iconic gate — working in the same direction. Carlsberg proved that the best thing you can do with a great old identity is to draw it again, carefully, for a new century.

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