Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche and the families.

Roche takes its name from its founder, Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, who set up the company in Basel in 1896. Wikipedia gives the founding date as 1 October 1896, and the Swiss news site Le News repeated the year and the founder in September 2015. The double surname is the founder’s own, and the short form of it, Roche, is the name the company uses for its brand around the world.

The company’s legal name keeps the full form. Wikipedia calls the group Roche Holding AG and its operating company F. Hoffmann-La Roche, and its headquarters remain in Basel, on the Rhine, in the same city as its neighbour Novartis.

Ownership has stayed close to the founding families. When Roche and Novartis announced a deal on 4 November 2021, the news agency AFP reported Roche’s statement that the pool formed by shareholders of the founding families had held the majority of the votes represented at Roche general meetings, and that the transaction would not change control of the company. Wikipedia names the families as the Hoffmann and Oeri families.

The 2021 deal ended a long financial tie with Novartis. AFP reported that Novartis had been a shareholder of Roche since May 2001 and that Roche would buy back the voting shares Novartis held and then cancel them, subject to a shareholder vote at an extraordinary general meeting on 26 November 2021. Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan said it was the right time to sell after more than twenty years as a shareholder, and Roche chairman Christoph Franz said he was convinced the deal was in the interest of Roche and its shareholders.

The founder’s name, redrawn.

The Roche logo is built around the founder’s name. Wikipedia’s company article shows one Roche logo in use from 1967 to 2021, followed by a version introduced in 2021, which the encyclopedia credits to F. Hoffmann-La Roche.

The design firm Pentagram describes its part in that update in a case study on its website. Pentagram says design has always played an important part in Roche’s offer, and that the company’s archive is full of examples of the Swiss Style, the Basel and Zurich school of grid-based graphic design. That legacy, it says, inspired a subtly evolved look rather than a break with the past.

According to Pentagram, the new system was centred on the existing logo, with the name of the founder, and refined to work across online and offline uses. It says Roche Blue was made a more vibrant, richer shade, and that a broader palette took the brand from a blue and grey tonal range to a warmer one. Pentagram also says a bespoke type family was created to set Roche apart from other healthcare brands: Roche Sans and Roche Serif. Alongside the logo, the type and the colour, it lists a close and personal style of photography as part of the toolkit, all of it meant to express what it calls “One Roche”.

Those are the agency’s own words about its own work, and they describe a refinement more than a reinvention. The name, the founder’s surname and the blue all carried through. What changed was the shade, the range of colours around it and the letterforms used for everything other than the logo itself.

The 2021 timing matches the date Wikipedia gives for the new logo, and it was the same year the company settled its long shareholder relationship with Novartis. The two events are separate, but both belong to the record of how the brand looked and who held it in that year.

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.

Towers on the Rhine.

In Basel, the Roche identity is also architectural. The company’s headquarters building, known as Building 1 or Bau 1 and widely called the Roche Tower, was designed by the Basel architects Herzog & de Meuron. Le News reported on 22 September 2015 that the tower had opened the previous Friday; Wikipedia gives the opening date as 18 September 2015 and the groundbreaking as 9 May 2012.

A second tower followed. In February 2015 the travel and architecture network Guiding Architects reported that, shortly before Building 1 was finished, Roche had asked the architects to plan an extension and that they had proposed a second, taller tower beside it, a plan it said had caused some controversy. Le News wrote in September 2015 that Building 2 was planned for completion by 2021, and Wikipedia’s photograph of the company shows the two towers side by side in 2022.

Roche has also built its brand through acquisitions that keep their own names. Wikipedia records that Roche acquired Syntex in 1994, the Corange group, parent of Boehringer Mannheim, in 1998, and Chugai Pharmaceuticals in 2002. In 2009 it completed its purchase of Genentech, which Wikipedia describes as a wholly owned independent subsidiary; after that deal, it says, Roche moved its United States headquarters from New Jersey to Genentech’s site in South San Francisco.

So the brand works on two levels. At the top sits a single short name taken from the founder, set in a blue that Pentagram describes as brighter than before, and housed in Basel in towers by a Basel practice. Below it, companies such as Genentech and Chugai continue under their own names.

For a design guide, Roche shows how a founder’s name and a single colour can anchor a family-controlled company for well over a century. Compare Novartis, its Basel neighbour, and Bayer Aspirin, another European pharmaceutical name with a long-running mark. For this guide we use a deep blue, a bright blue and a warm ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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