Fujifilm Brand Guidelines: The Red, the Split ‘ii’ & Type

Fujifilm’s 2006 wordmark isn’t just a redesign — it’s the visual moment the company decided to survive.

Fujifilm’s current identity is a bold, lowercase-styled “Fujifilm” wordmark whose signature quirk is a split, doubled “ii” — the dot-and-stem rendered in two fragments, red on top, black below, with red as the only colour. It’s purely typographic; the old film-box symbol was dropped. Crucially, the mark was introduced on 1 October 2006, alongside the formation of FUJIFILM Holdings, and it was a statement: the company was diversifying beyond film. The prior logo — the classic red-on-green film carton — had run 26 years; retiring it announced a new era.

The heritage is deep. The company was founded on 20 January 1934 as Fuji Photo Film Co., spun off from Dai-Nippon Celluloid. Its most famous survival story is real: as digital killed film, Fujifilm pivoted its core chemistry into healthcare, cosmetics (Astalift) and materials and survived, while Kodak — which clung to film — went bankrupt in 2012 (though Kodak lived on, smaller). The 2006 rebrand is the graphic bookmark on that pivot, and the retro-styled X-series cameras (from 2012) later rebuilt Fujifilm’s photography identity even as the parent company moved on.

Fujifilm’s colours carry both its present and its heritage. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The current mark leans on a corporate red (commonly rendered around #ED1C24) with a near-black wordmark. But the brand’s heritage colour is a green: the classic Fujicolor consumer film carton was green (a deliberate counter to Kodak’s yellow), with the red logo — so the red-and-green pairing is genuine brand history, even if today’s corporate mark is red-and-black. (Fujifilm doesn’t publish an open brand book with codified hex, so all these values are third-party approximations, and the historic green is reconstructed.)

The design lesson is about colour as heritage vs. colour as signal. Fujifilm deliberately shed the red/green film-box look in 2006 to signal it was no longer just a film company — a case of a brand giving up beloved equity to change perception. Yet the green survives in memory and in the X-series’ nostalgia, showing that heritage colour lingers whether or not the logo keeps it. For your own work, it’s a reminder that changing a palette is a powerful way to reposition — and that the old colours don’t fully die; they become the emotional backstory your audience still feels.

The wordmark is a custom logotype — its personality lives in one small detail.

The “Fujifilm” wordmark is a bespoke bold sans logotype, not an off-the-shelf font, and its whole character sits in that split, two-tone “ii” — a tiny piece of engineering that turns an ordinary name into a recognisable mark. (“Fuji Sans” fonts online are lookalikes, not the official face, and no designer is publicly credited.) It’s a good example of doing a lot with a little: one clever letterform detail, a single red accent, and an otherwise plain bold sans is enough to carry a global corporate identity across film, cameras, healthcare and cosmetics.

Few marks carry as much strategy as Fujifilm’s quiet 2006 change.

The story behind the wordmark is the whole point. By dropping the film-box symbol and the green in 2006, Fujifilm used design to tell the world it was becoming a diversified technology company — and it backed the claim by pivoting its film chemistry into medicine and cosmetics, outlasting the very product it was named for. One nuance worth keeping honest: the “Fuji” name does honour Mount Fuji (chosen by the first CEO), but the name was already trademarked and had to be bought for ¥8,000, and the plants actually sit near Mount Hakone, not Fuji — a small correction to a tidy origin story.

For designers, Fujifilm is a lesson in using identity to signal transformation. A logo change can’t save a company on its own, but paired with real strategic change it becomes a powerful flag: “we are not what we were.” Retire the equity that ties you to a dying category, keep just enough (the name, a colour, a memory) to stay recognisable, and let one distinctive detail — a split “ii” — carry the new mark. Done alongside genuine reinvention, as Fujifilm managed, a quiet wordmark can mark the difference between a company that survives and one that doesn’t.

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