London and Seattle, 1995 to 1999.

Getty Images began in London as a company whose business was buying other picture businesses. Wikipedia says Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein co-founded Getty Investments LLC in London in 1995, with Klein as chief executive and Mark Getty as chairman. Wikipedia says the business got its start by acquiring Tony Stone Images in March 1995, which formed its foundation.

The name Getty Images arrived two years later. Wikipedia says that in September 1997 the company, by then called Getty Communications, merged with PhotoDisc, Inc. to form Getty Images. Wikipedia says the combined company relocated to Seattle two years later and expanded there. Since 2011, it says, the headquarters has been in the Union Station office complex in Seattle’s International District.

The company’s written name has been simple from the outset. Wikipedia gives its stylised form as gettyimages, one word in lower case, a mark that puts the family surname and the product side by side. The name ties the business to Mark Getty’s family, which Wikipedia lists as an owner of the company today.

The early years were spent gathering collections. Wikipedia lists acquisitions made by 1999 including the sports agency Allsport, the online art seller Art.com, the Benelux and Scandinavian agency World View in 1996, the news specialists Liaison Agency and Newsmakers, and the celebrity agency Online USA. As each library came in, Wikipedia says, the company digitised the pictures so they could be searched, licensed and downloaded online, and clients use the website to search, buy usage rights and download.

Getty Images also kept a physical address in London for showing work. Wikipedia says the Getty Images Gallery was located on Eastcastle Street, and that in 2008 it hosted an exhibition called “Home Time” for Barnardo’s, aimed at finding adoptive homes for children.

Hulton, iStock and a run of owners.

One of the collections Getty Images bought is British. Wikipedia says the Hulton Press Library, the former picture archive of the magazine Picture Post, was sold by the BBC to Brian Deutsch in 1988 and renamed Hulton Deutsch. Getty Images purchased it in 1996 and renamed it Hulton Getty. The collection reaches back to the nineteenth century and, Wikipedia says, includes the Keystone collection and work by photographers such as Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt and Weegee. In 2000 Getty bought Archive Photos of New York and combined it with Hulton Getty to form a new subsidiary, Hulton Archive, the name the collection still carries.

Other archives followed. Wikipedia dates the Michael Ochs Archives, a music photography collection, to February 2007; the purchase of MediaVast in 2007, which brought the entertainment and red-carpet agencies WireImage, FilmMagic and Contour; and Redferns, the music library built up by the British photographer David Redfern, in 2008. In April 2003, it says, Getty Images entered a partnership with Agence France-Presse to market each other’s pictures.

A second consumer-facing brand came in 2006. Wikipedia says the microstock website iStockphoto was acquired on 9 February 2006. In March 2021 Getty Images added Unsplash, a free-to-use photography site, which Wikipedia lists as a subsidiary alongside iStock.

Ownership has changed several times. Wikipedia says the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman completed its acquisition of Getty Images on 2 July 2008, when the shares stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2012 the company was sold to the Carlyle Group, with Mark Getty, Klein and the Getty family carrying their investments into the new structure. In September 2018 the Getty family announced it would take a majority stake from Carlyle. Wikipedia says Dawn Airey was chief executive from 2015 until the end of 2018, when Craig Peters took the role, and that in July 2022 the company returned to the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GETY through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company.

A surname and a product in one lower-case word.

Colophons, credit lines and the catalogue as brand surfaces

For a publisher of illustrated books, the identity rarely lives in one big logo. It turns up in small, repeated places: the colophon on the title page, the device stamped at the foot of the spine, the imprint line on the copyright page. A reader may never notice any of these on their own, but a shelf of books from one house shows them all at once, and the spine mark is often the first thing a browser sees.

Series design does the heavier lifting. A shared grid, a fixed type family, a consistent cover format and a numbered sequence tell the buyer that one title belongs with the others. Good series work leaves room for each book’s own image while keeping the frame recognisable.

A picture agency works through different surfaces. Its name appears in the credit line printed beside or beneath a photograph, often in tiny type, and that line travels across newspapers, magazines, books and screens the agency does not control. Catalogues, archive websites, exhibition walls and print-sale pages then carry the fuller visual system, where typography, white space and image handling set the tone. In both trades, the brand is built less by declaration than by steady, quiet repetition.

A sub-brand identity in 2013, a merger plan and a restructuring.

A documented piece of identity design in the Getty Images family belongs to iStock. Design Week reported on 19 September 2013 that the studio Build had created a new identity for iStock, which it described as part of Getty Images. Build’s creative director Michael C Place told the magazine the company wanted to move away from being seen as just a photo library, since it also offered illustration, video and other content. The project began as a full branding job with an icon system, but the icon system was dropped and the final identity was built around the iStock wordmark with the strapline “By Getty Images”. Place said the earlier camera motif was no longer relevant. The wordmark ends in a full stop, which he said refers to iStock’s dot-com origins, and Build worked with the foundry ARS Type on a supporting typeface, ARS Maquette, for advertising and other uses.

The years since have been dominated by corporate news. The video trade site Newsshooter published on 9 January 2025 the press release, dated 7 January 2025 in New York, in which Getty Images and Shutterstock announced a definitive agreement to combine in a merger of equals, with the combined company to keep the name Getty Images Holdings and the ticker GETY. The plan did not go ahead. 80 Level reported on 9 July 2026 that Getty Images had dropped the merger after the UK Competition and Markets Authority said it would clear the deal only if Shutterstock sold its editorial business, and that Getty notified the regulator of the termination on 7 July 2026.

A restructuring followed. Reuters, in a report carried by KSL on 12 October 2026, said Getty Images had secured support from major creditors and investors for a plan to take the company private, after which affiliates of the Getty family and Koch Equity Development would own the reorganised company. Reuters said the plan would run through a prepackaged Chapter 11 process for certain US entities and was expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Through all of this the company name has stayed the same: a family surname followed by a plain description of the product, written as one lower-case word.

For a design guide, Getty Images shows how a picture business can be assembled from many older archives while presenting one short name, and how a sub-brand such as iStock can be reworked around type and punctuation rather than a camera. Compare Shutterstock, the New York agency that agreed to merge with Getty Images in 2025, and Magnum Photos, a photographers’ cooperative with its own archive. For this guide we use archive navy, contact-sheet grey and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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