An accounting professor’s name on the door.

McKinsey & Company carries the surname of James O. McKinsey, a professor of accounting at the University of Chicago. According to Wikipedia, he founded the firm in Chicago in 1926 under the name James O. McKinsey & Company. It described itself as an “accounting and management firm” and began by advising clients on how to use accounting principles as a tool of management, an idea McKinsey had formed while working for the United States Army Ordnance Department, where he saw inefficiency among military suppliers.

The name that survives today was settled through a decade of mergers and separations. Wikipedia says the firm hired A. T. Kearney in 1929 and Marvin Bower in 1933, and opened an office in New York in 1932. In 1935 it merged with the accounting firm Scovell, Wellington & Company, creating the New York-based McKinsey, Wellington & Co., while the accounting practice was split off into a Chicago firm called Wellington & Company.

That arrangement did not last. In 1939, Wikipedia records, the combined business was divided again. The accounting practice went back to Scovell, Wellington & Company, and the management engineering practice was split into two: McKinsey & Company and McKinsey, Kearney & Company. Bower partnered with Guy Crockett of Scovell Wellington, who invested in the New York firm and became its managing partner, with Bower as his deputy. In 1946, according to Wikipedia, the New York office bought exclusive rights to the McKinsey name from the former Chicago office, which separated as A. T. Kearney.

Bower is the figure closely tied to the firm’s culture. Wikipedia credits him with founding the firm’s principles and strategy, and under his direction McKinsey expanded into Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. He led the firm as managing director from 1950 to 1967. The firm launched its business magazine, The McKinsey Quarterly, in 1964, giving the name a regular presence in print beyond client reports.

The way people refer to the firm has drifted over the decades. The full legal-style form, with its ampersand, is what appears on the logo; in conversation the firm is often just “McKinsey”, and Wikipedia notes the informal shorthand “McK”. That gap between a formal mark and a one-word everyday name is common in professional services, and it shaped the 2019 redesign.

Wolff Olins and the 2019 identity.

In February 2019 McKinsey introduced a new identity designed by the agency Wolff Olins. Brand New, the identity review site run by Armin Vit, reviewed it on 27 February 2019, quoting the firm’s own brand microsite at length. McKinsey said the identity was designed to communicate a balance between old and new, heritage and modernity, and that it had made the idea of “high contrast” a guiding light for the whole system.

The wordmark changed least. McKinsey described it as an evolution of its historic serif logo, redesigned with modern character for digital as well as physical use, and said its script mark had been refined and realigned. Vit wrote that the old logo had already been a decent, nicely spaced serif with a solid ampersand, and that the new one added personality through a custom serif: he pointed to the terminals of the “c” and “a”, the slightly angled axis of the “e”, a subtle dip in the upper part of the ampersand, and bottom serifs blended to keep the spacing even. He also noted that the stacked words were aligned in a way that broke from centred or flush-left conventions, and that the mark held up at small sizes.

The second element was a typeface. McKinsey said it had a new typeface unique to the firm, named Bower, with letterforms intended to be characterful and bold so that headlines would cut through. Vit wrote that it was named after Marvin Bower, and described it as a bold, crisp serif with spiky details.

The third element was a moving graphic. McKinsey called it the “Partnership Mark”, a dynamic line element crafted, the firm said, to symbolise the way it aspired to partner with clients. Vit noted that the firm was also using it as a social-media avatar. The fourth was photography: McKinsey said its new imagery style used contrast and intense focus, and Vit described grayscale pictures edged with a shimmer of blues and purples, a house style meant to make images from different sources look related.

Read together, the system keeps its established asset, the surname set in serif capitals and lowercase with its ampersand, and builds new tools around it: a typeface named for the partner who shaped the New York firm, a line motif about partnership, and a blue-led photographic treatment.

Partner names, initials and restrained marks.

Professional-services identities tend to be built from a short list of raw materials. The earliest is the partner’s surname: many advisory and accounting firms began as the name of one or two founders on a brass plate, and that surname often survives long after the founders have left, because clients and regulators already know it. When firms combine, the name usually grows by addition, with surnames joined by ampersands, and then shrinks again as the string becomes unwieldy. Initialisms are the common end point, turning a row of names into two, three or four letters that fit a business card, a building sign and a browser tab.

Mergers and separations also force renames. A firm that splits from a former parent, or that must stop using a name it no longer owns, sometimes coins a new word instead of reusing a surname, and that coined word then has to earn meaning through use. The visual side is usually restrained: a wordmark set in a sober serif or sans, one corporate colour used consistently, and a small graphic accent such as a dot, a bar or a typographic mark that stands in for a symbol. Redesigns in this field often adjust spacing, weight and colour rather than replacing the name, so continuity is part of the message.

A partnership that kept its founder’s name.

McKinsey & Company, an American firm, has kept its founder’s surname through every reorganisation since the 1930s. The 1939 split is the moment that fixed the brand: one practice kept the McKinsey name in New York, and the accountants returned to their own partnership; in 1946 the New York firm bought exclusive rights to the name, and the former Chicago office went on as A. T. Kearney. Since then the firm has grown under a series of managing directors and later global managing partners, but the name on the door has not changed.

The firm’s publishing arm carries the same name. The McKinsey Quarterly has appeared since 1964, and Wikipedia says the firm funds the McKinsey Global Institute, founded in 1990. Both put the surname on covers and report titles. The 2019 identity treated those publications, its website and its social channels as one system, with the Bower typeface and the photographic style tying them together.

What makes the 2019 work useful as a reference is how little it disturbed the core. The firm described a refinement, not a replacement: the serif wordmark was redrawn rather than swapped for a sans, the ampersand stayed, and the change was carried by new supporting parts. In Brand New’s reading, the custom details in the letters were what gave the mark its character, and the system’s consistency across print, mobile and social media was what made it work.

For a design guide, McKinsey & Company shows how a professional firm can modernise around a surname without changing it, letting a typeface, a line motif and a colour treatment do the new work. Compare Boston Consulting Group, which joined its initials into a green monogram in 2018, and Bain & Company, the Boston firm founded by a BCG partner in 1973. For this guide we use deep navy, an electric blue and a mist tint with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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