A chemicals business on Bartlett Street.

Pfizer carries the surname of one of its two founders. In 1849, Wikipedia says, Charles Pfizer and Charles F. Erhart, cousins who had emigrated to the United States from Ludwigsburg in Germany, set up a business making chemical compounds in New York. Its base was on Bartlett Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an area that became part of the city of Brooklyn and, from 1898, of Greater New York.

Brooklyn stayed at the centre of the company for more than a century. Wikipedia says Pfizer kept buying property in the area to expand its laboratory and factory, kept offices on Flushing Avenue until the 1960s, and closed the Brooklyn plant in 2009. The business grew in the 1880s on the production of citric acid, according to the same account, and on 2 June 1942 it incorporated under Delaware law.

The modern company was shaped by a run of acquisitions and separations. Wikipedia records that Pfizer acquired Warner-Lambert in June 2000, Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth in October 2009. In February 2013 its animal-health business became a separate listed company, Zoetis, and in November 2020 Pfizer combined its off-patent business, known as Upjohn, with Mylan to form Viatris. pharmaphorum summed up that direction in January 2021: Pfizer had moved away from being a diversified healthcare company, covering human and animal medicines, generics and consumer products, towards a narrower focus, and was placing its consumer-health arm in a joint venture with GlaxoSmithKline.

The headquarters moved too. For decades the company was run from 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. In April 2023, Wikipedia says, citing Crain’s New York Business, Pfizer moved its world headquarters to The Spiral, a tower at Hudson Yards on the west side of Manhattan. The name on the door had not changed since the 1840s; what had changed was the mark beside it.

Unlocking the pill.

For decades Pfizer’s logo was a blue, pill-like shape carrying the name. In January 2021 the company replaced it. pharmaphorum reported the next day, under the byline of Phil Taylor, that the decades-old pill-like logo had given way to a DNA double helix, and that the new mark kept the company’s traditional blue. The work, it said, had been more than 18 months in the making.

Pfizer explained the change in its own words. The company said the design was about “unlocking the pill to reveal Pfizer’s DNA”, and an explanation on its website, quoted by pharmaphorum, said the new logo signalled a “shift from commerce to science”. Sally Susman, Pfizer’s chief corporate affairs officer, said the identity was meant to reflect the company’s history and its focus on science.

Creative Bloq, in a piece by Daniel John published on 6 January 2021, named the designers. The identity, it said, was the result of 18 months of work by Team, a design agency based in Brooklyn, the borough where the company began in 1849. The same report described the rest of the system. Pfizer adopted Noto Sans, a type family designed by Google for use across the world’s languages, as its typeface, and stripped a wider colour palette down to a simplified two-tone blue. Pfizer’s own line on that choice, quoted by Creative Bloq, was: “In an industry awash with blue, we’re doubling down.”

Not everyone was won over. Creative Bloq called the result an appropriately clean, clinical new look, if a little dull, and pharmaphorum noted that one commenter online had questioned which way the helix twisted. Both reactions are part of the record of a corporate mark that changed, for once, in public view.

Corporate marks in pharma.

Pharmaceutical corporate identities are shaped as much by corporate history as by design. Many of the names in this sector were built through mergers, and the result is often a compound of two older names, a contraction of a longer one, or a set of initials that eventually replaces the full name altogether. A rename after a merger or a spin-off is usually the moment when a new logo, a new colour and a new typeface arrive together, presented as a single programme rather than a piecemeal refresh.

The marks themselves tend towards the abstract: interlocking shapes, simple geometric symbols or a plain wordmark, rather than pictures of anything specific. Palettes are often restrained, built around one signature colour with white space and a neutral supporting set, so that the same identity can sit on a corporate report, a laboratory building and a recruitment page without changing tone.

Promotion in this field is also regulated in many countries, with rules on what companies may say about medicines and to whom. That framework pushes corporate branding towards the company name, its values and its people, while product communication follows separate rules. The guides in this round look only at the corporate side: names, marks, colours and the dated changes behind them.

One name, two blues.

What makes the Pfizer identity unusual is how little of it changed in 2021 and how much the change was talked about. The name stayed. The blue stayed. The company kept a single corporate name for well over a century and a half, through the Brooklyn years, the 1942 incorporation, the acquisitions of Warner-Lambert, Pharmacia and Wyeth, and the separations that created Zoetis and Viatris. Wikipedia lists the pill-shaped designs as the former corporate logos, in use until 2021.

The 2021 system is built from very few parts. There is the wordmark, the helix beside it, two blues and one typeface. Noto Sans is a Google family rather than a font drawn for the company, so the distinctive part of the system is not a bespoke font but the shape of the symbol and the narrow colour range around it. Creative Bloq reported Pfizer’s own reasoning: in a field where many companies use blue, it chose to commit to blue more firmly rather than move away from it.

The helix also gave the company a simple story to tell about its own history. In the account Pfizer gave in January 2021, the closed capsule of the old logo stood for commerce and the opened helix for science. That is the company’s framing of its mark, not a claim this guide makes about its products, and it is the reason the redesign drew so much comment from the design press: a corporate logo was being used to describe a change of direction.

The places tell the same story in miniature. The business began on Bartlett Street in Williamsburg, kept offices on Flushing Avenue, ran for decades from 42nd Street and, since April 2023, from The Spiral at Hudson Yards. The agency that drew the helix, Team, works from Brooklyn, the borough where Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart started out.

For a design guide, Pfizer shows how a long-lived corporate name can carry a new symbol without losing its colour. Compare Bayer Aspirin, another pharmaceutical name with a long-running mark, and Merck, another American pharmaceutical company. For this guide we use two blues, navy and a pale blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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