Seven railway companies, one company and a round badge, 1938.

SNCF stands for Société nationale des chemins de fer français, the French national railway company. English Wikipedia says it became effective on 1 January 1938, following an agreement signed on 31 August 1937 between the government, the private railway companies and the railway unions. The group’s headquarters are in Saint-Denis, just north of Paris.

The identity began as a badge for that merger. French Wikipedia’s history of the company says the original SNCF insignia was drawn by the typographer Maximilien Vox, after Marcelle Hirtz and Paul Martial, and used from 1 January 1938 until 1967. Its interlaced letters were meant to stand for the union of the different railway companies. The same article says it is sometimes called the “logo macaron”, and that on rolling stock this round badge with interlaced letters stayed in use until the early 1970s. Monotype, the type company, describes the 1938 mark in a case study written with SNCF as a circular monogram designed by Vox.

The postwar marks were largely for paper. French Wikipedia says a second logo of 1947 set the initials over a map of France, a choice it links to the company’s role in reconstruction, and that this version appeared on documents and posters rather than on trains. A third logo with thick italic letters appeared in the early 1960s, again on documents only. The article reads the italics as an idea of speed, and the heavy strokes as a statement of stability and power.

A framed version followed. French Wikipedia dates the next logo’s period of use from 1967 to 1 December 1985, and describes a 1972 variant that put the italic letters inside a cartouche with slanted sides, known as the “logo encadré”, usually blue letters on white and sometimes reversed. Monotype’s timeline puts the bold italic mark at 1966 and describes it as green, a colour it says stood for strength and speed.

Tallon’s rails, Desgrippes’s arrow and Carré Noir’s carmine.

The industrial designer Roger Tallon drew the next mark. French Wikipedia says Tallon, who designed the Corail train and the TGV Atlantique, worked out a new graphic charter with SNCF, and that his logo kept roughly the concept of the previous one but doubled its lines, so that they read as rails and suggested fluidity. Rail enthusiasts, it says, nicknamed it the “logo nouille”. The article gives its period of use as 2 December 1985 to 13 December 1992. Monotype dates the same redesign to 1986 and describes it as a simplified wordmark with no frame and open letters that looked like rails. A report broadcast by Antenne 2 on 21 February 1985, held in the INA archive, shows Tallon presenting a model of a TGV Atlantique carriage after two years of work with SNCF on the train.

The next change was a revision. French Wikipedia says Joël Desgrippes added a red arrow to the existing letters, to show a company looking ahead, and a wide grey band standing for the rails and for stability, and that the changes were meant to stop the logo drifting as different departments adapted it in their own way. This version, used from 14 December 1992 to 16 March 2005, was nicknamed the “logo casquette”. Written answers from the transport ministry, published in the Journal officiel on 19 September 2006 in reply to two deputies, also date the previous change of logo to 1992, and said a new logo was needed to support the company’s commercial development.

The 2005 mark broke with all of that. English Wikipedia says the current logo was created in 2005 by the agency Carré Noir, a subsidiary of the Publicis group. French Wikipedia gives 17 March 2005 as its start date and says the shape was meant to express “determination and movement” and recalls the nose of the TGV Duplex, while its lettering takes its cue from the TGV logo. Monotype describes its colours as carmine and vermilion.

It was then simplified. Both Wikipedias say the logo was reworked in 2011 with rounded corners, the shadows inside and behind the letters removed and a clearer gap between them, and French Wikipedia dates the current version from 29 August 2011.

A carmine shape, a typeface and four notes.

A railway carries its identity at walking pace and at full speed. Livery is the part that travels: a coat of colour on a locomotive or a set of carriages becomes a moving billboard, seen side-on at a level crossing, head-on at a platform and as a stripe through a valley, so the colour has to hold up at a distance and in every kind of weather. The mark has to work on a vehicle that runs in both directions, which is why many railway symbols are drawn to read correctly whichever way the train is moving. The fixed parts of the system speak just as loudly. A station clock, a departure board and a platform sign are seen every day by people who never look at an advertisement, and their typeface, colours and pictograms tell passengers which railway they are using before they have read a word of it.

A state or national railway often has to carry two identities at once. Its own mark may sit beside a national symbol such as a flag or a government wordmark, and in a country with more than one official language the name itself has to work in each of them, or be short enough to belong to none. Below the company sits a family of sub-brands: named trains, classes of service and fare cards, each with its own colours or character. The same mark then has to work at very different sizes, from a small symbol printed on a ticket or a smart card to lettering painted along the side of a locomotive.

A typeface, a sound and a family of train brands.

The logo sits inside a larger system. Monotype’s case study says SNCF chose Avenir, the geometric sans that Adrian Frutiger published in 1988, as its corporate typeface, to complement the logo across the parent company and its sub-brands, and that it was tested in bright and dim light and in dark-on-light and light-on-dark settings. Isabelle Patard, named there as SNCF’s head of brand identity, is quoted saying the company chose it as a simple typeface that conveys reliability and strength.

The company also has a sound. English Wikipedia says the SNCF sound logo, four notes rendered as C, G, A flat and E flat, was created in 2005 by Michaël Boumendil and the agency Sixième Son, and that Simone Hérault has been the voice of SNCF since 1981.

Design runs through the trains as well as the letters. Monotype’s case study cites the “nez cassé”, or broken-nose, locomotive style developed by Paul Arzens, and Tallon’s work on the TGV, from seating and colours to lighting and route maps. French Wikipedia dates the commercial launch of the TGV to 27 September 1981, on the Paris–Lyon line, and the high-speed service grew into a family of brands. The same article says SNCF launched Ouigo, its low-cost TGV brand, on 2 April 2013, and that in May 2017 it announced two TGV offers: Ouigo and the premium TGV inOui. Both now sit with SNCF Voyageurs, the passenger company, alongside Intercités, TER and Transilien, and Ouigo also runs in Spain as Ouigo España.

The sub-brands keep their own identities. Monotype says Avenir was meant to connect the company’s brands even as each kept its own look, and names Ouigo and TGV inOui as examples. SNCF Voyageurs also holds stakes in international operators, among them Eurostar, whose identity has its own history.

For a design guide, SNCF shows how a national company can keep the same four initials through six redraws, moving from a round merger badge to italic speed, Tallon’s rails and a carmine shape drawn from a train’s nose, while a typeface and a sound hold the system together. Compare Eurostar, the cross-Channel operator in which SNCF is a shareholder, and Deutsche Bahn, its national neighbour across the Rhine. For this guide we use carmine, vermilion and rail grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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