L3Harris Brand Guidelines: An 1895 Press Maker, L-3 & the 2019 Merger

A printing-press maker and a 1997 spin-out.

L3Harris is the product of two very different companies. The older one began as the Harris Automatic Press Company, founded by Alfred S. Harris in Niles, Ohio, in 1895, English Wikipedia says. For about six decades it developed lithographic processes and printing presses, and in 1957 it bought the typesetting-machine maker Intertype and the broadcast-transmitter maker Gates Radio, keeping the Gates name on the back of transmitters labelled Harris on the front.

The turn toward electronics came in 1967, when Harris merged with Radiation, Inc. of Melbourne, Florida, a developer of antennas, integrated circuits and modems used in the space programme. Harris moved its headquarters from Cleveland to Melbourne in 1978 and sold its printing operations in 1983. Over the following decades it bought and sold semiconductor, computer and broadcast businesses — spinning off its remaining chip operations as Intersil in 1999 and selling the broadcast arm in 2012 — and in May 2015 it completed the purchase of Exelis, which English Wikipedia says almost doubled the size of the company.

The other half, L-3 Communications, was formed in 1997 to acquire business units from Lockheed Martin that had previously belonged to Loral. Its name came from the initials of its founders, Frank Lanza and Robert LaPenta, and of their partner, Lehman Brothers. At the end of 2016 the company renamed itself L3 Technologies to reflect its wider focus, and its web address moved from L-3com.com to L3T.com. English Wikipedia notes that it had no corporate connection with Level 3 Communications, the networking company whose name was also shortened to “L3.”

A merger of equals in Melbourne.

In October 2018 Harris and L3 announced an all-stock “merger of equals.” As a condition of the deal Harris had to sell its night-vision division, English Wikipedia says, because combining the two companies’ night-vision operations would otherwise have concentrated that market in one company. The merger was completed on 29 June 2019, and the new L3Harris Technologies took Harris’s home city of Melbourne, Florida, as its headquarters. The same year L3Harris settled with the US State Department over 131 alleged violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Arms Export Control Act by Harris before the merger.

The company has since reshaped itself several times. In January 2022 it removed its Aviation Systems segment and spread those divisions among the others. In December 2022 it agreed to buy the propulsion maker Aerojet Rocketdyne, and it completed the purchase in July 2023. English Wikipedia says Aerojet traced its origins to the General Tire and Rubber Company, founded in 1915, while Rocketdyne was created in 1955 as a division of North American Aviation; the two were combined in 2013. L3Harris sold its Commercial Aviation Solutions business to The Jordan Company in a sale completed in March 2025, after which that business was renamed Acron Aviation.

By 2026, English Wikipedia says, L3Harris was organised in three segments: Space & Mission Systems, Communications & Spectrum Dominance and Missile Solutions. The company’s third-quarter results release, issued from Melbourne on 29 October 2026, reports on the same three segments and names Sam Mehta as president and chief executive.

Design and documentation.

Aerospace and defence contractors sell to a small number of governments and agencies, yet they still build public identities with care. Their brand work usually leans on engineering rather than on lifestyle imagery: aircraft photographed on test flights, ships on sea trials, spacecraft on the pad or in the clean room, each shown as a finished piece of engineering with the company name in plain type beside it.

People are the second pillar. Contractors of this size employ large engineering workforces, and their websites and reports give space to portraits of engineers, technicians and assembly teams, often in hangars and workshops. Careers pages, apprenticeship schemes and internship programmes carry much of the visual identity, because recruiting skilled staff is a constant task, and STEM outreach with schools and universities is presented as part of the same story.

Public appearances follow a familiar pattern. Air shows and trade exhibitions bring large branded stands, full-scale models and static displays, where a logo has to work at the size of a building and on a lanyard. Annual reports and sustainability reports, written for investors as much as for customers, are among the most consistently designed documents these companies publish, with set colour palettes, house typefaces and long heritage timelines.

Heritage itself is a recurring theme. Many of today’s large contractors are the product of mergers, and they present their predecessor companies, founders and historic programmes as part of their identity. This guide keeps combat imagery out and looks at names, marks, colour and type, and at how each company describes its own history.

Radios, sensors and rocket engines.

English Wikipedia lists products spanning tactical radios, night-vision equipment, avionics, satellite payloads and antennas. Named examples include the Integrated Core Processor, the main aircraft computer in the F-35 and the C-130J, and the AN/PVS-31A binocular night-vision device. From Aerojet Rocketdyne came the RS-25 engine, developed for the Space Shuttle and planned for early Space Launch System flights, and the RL10 upper-stage engine, two of which are used on the Centaur V stage of the Vulcan rocket.

Production is spread across many US sites. In a press release of 20 October 2026 the company said it had opened a new solid rocket motor production facility in Camden, Arkansas, designed to double its current capacity for motors for the US Army’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System programme. The facility was part of a 2023 cooperative agreement that also covered new buildings at its Orange County, Virginia, site and upgrades at its Huntsville, Alabama, facilities, the release says.

Two further changes followed in 2026. In January 2026 L3Harris agreed to sell a majority stake in Aerojet Rocketdyne’s space propulsion and power business to AE Industrial Partners, which plans to run it under the Rocketdyne name; English Wikipedia says the deal includes the RL10 but not the RS-25. Later that month the company announced plans for an initial public offering of its Missile Solutions business, with L3Harris keeping control. AE Industrial completed its purchase of a 60 per cent stake on 4 August 2026, with L3Harris keeping a minority interest, SpaceNews reported. In late July 2026 L3Harris postponed the Missile Solutions offering to mid-2027, citing market conditions, Breaking Defense reported, so that listing had not taken place at the time of writing.

On its website the company pairs the merged name — one word, with the numeral at its centre — with the line “Fast. Forward.”

For a design guide, L3Harris shows how one merged name can carry two histories: a nineteenth-century press maker and a 1990s spin-out named after its founders’ initials. Compare Lockheed Martin, whose former units formed L-3 in 1997, and Northrop Grumman. For this guide we use a deep navy, a steel grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep L3Harris’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.