Swiss Post Brand Guidelines: 1849, Post Yellow, a Frutiger Logo & the 2023 Black P

Fourteen cantonal posts, one federal service.

Swiss Post dates its history to 1 January 1849, when the postal service of the new federal state took over the fourteen cantonal postal services, English Wikipedia says; the company describes it as the moment the federal state unified the postal system and made it responsible for transporting letters, parcels, people and cash remittances. Before that, post had been run by the cantons and by operators such as the Thurn und Taxis post in Schaffhausen and the Fischer family’s post in Bern. The cantonal post of Zürich issued Switzerland’s first stamp in 1843, and in 1850 the first stamps valid across the whole country followed.

The service grew with the railways and the roads. Swiss Post says mail was sorted on trains from 1857, that Switzerland was the fourth country in the world to introduce the postcard, in 1870, and that a military field post was set up in 1889. In 1874 Bern hosted the founding congress of the Universal Postal Union. In 1906 two lasting services began: a postal cheque and giro service, the forerunner of today’s PostFinance, which the company says could draw on 4,000 operating locations; and the first motor mail route, from Bern to Detligen, the start of the PostBus. The last horse-drawn mail coach, on the Avers–Juf route, ran in 1961.

In the 1920s the post was merged with the telegraph and telephone services to form the PTT. During both world wars, Swiss Post says, it worked with the Red Cross to carry several hundred million postage-free items from prisoners of war and internees, and free military field post made up as much as a quarter of domestic letters; English Wikipedia notes that Swiss air mail dwindled during the Second World War until it was halted in 1944. Postcodes arrived on 1 October 1964, making Switzerland the third country to use them, after the United States and Germany, according to English Wikipedia, and the first Postomat cash machine opened in Bern in 1978.

A cross, a post horn, yellow and a black P.

Swiss Post publishes a history of its own marks, and it reads as a compact lesson in public-sector identity. The first logo of 1849, the company says, showed the Swiss cross as a coat of arms with a post horn, alpine roses and oak leaves, and stayed on letter boxes and Postbuses until well into the 1930s. In 1920 a busier design added a corona and an arc of 22 stars. By 1929 the post and the telegraph and telephone service each used a square coat of arms, a simple gold post horn for the post and a pole with insulators and wires for telephony, and in 1932 the two were combined into one PTT brand, with the Confederation officially allowing the PTT to use the Swiss cross. In 1937 the letters PTT were added in gold on black. In 1941, for the first time, the post horn was left out and the cross dominated, “possibly as a patriotic sign” in the uncertain years of the Second World War, the company writes.

Yellow came in stages. Swiss Post says “Swiss Post yellow” was used mainly on mail coaches and Postbuses until it became mandatory in 1939, and that in 2002 it secured a trademark on the colour yellow as an identifier of its core business. In the 1970s the PTT began to address corporate identity; a logo designed by the stamp designer Martin Altenburger and refined by the typeface designer Adrian Frutiger was approved in 1982, though its use became binding only from 1992. After the telecoms business left, with Telecom PTT renamed Swisscom on 1 October 1997, the PTT lettering disappeared in 1999 in a more open adaptation by Frutiger.

The brand family was then simplified. Swiss Post says it built flagship brands such as PostBus, PostFinance, PostMail and PostParcels from 2001, consolidated them in 2009 around the core brand and the two flagships PostBus and PostFinance, with the core brand adapted to each language region, and added the claim “Yellow in motion” in 2014. In 2023 it introduced a modernised logo that keeps the Swiss cross and the yellow and adds a new black “P”; one logo is now used across all language regions, and PostBus uses the same logo, in some cases with the post horn.

How postal operators present themselves.

Postal operators are among the oldest names a country carries. Many began as royal or state services centuries ago and became companies only in recent decades, and their identities often hold on to symbols from that past while the business shifts from letters to parcels. Colour does much of the work: red, yellow, blue and orange wordmarks appear on post boxes, vans, uniforms and counters, and a colour can outlast the institution that first chose it. Denmark’s postal service wore red and yellow even before it was nationalised in 1711, and Sweden’s has used a post horn with a crown since its foundation in 1636, according to English Wikipedia.

The symbols repeat across borders. Post horns appear in several European marks; envelopes, birds in flight and arrows suggest movement elsewhere. Names matter too. Many operators use the national name in the local language, or in two or three languages at once, and some now trade under a group name that sits above the post office itself.

Their public faces have changed with the work. Websites now lead with parcels, tracking and delivery options, then letters and stamps and, for some operators, payments, money transfers or banking. Parcel lockers, service points inside shops, delivery vans and counter photography have become as common in their imagery as the post box. Stamp issues remain a design programme of their own, with commemorative sets and products for collectors, and philately keeps older issues in view.

Most of these operators are state-owned, or were until recently, so laws, annual reports and press releases are the main record of their ownership and structure. This guide sets out what those records and independent press say about each operator’s history, ownership and visual habits, and marks the companies’ own claims as theirs.

A company under special law, PostFinance and PostBus.

The modern company took shape as the PTT was split. Under the Postal Act of 1997, in force from 1998, letters, parcels, payments and passenger transport went to Swiss Post, a public-law entity of the Confederation, and telecoms to Swisscom, English Wikipedia says. Under new postal legislation, German Wikipedia records, Swiss Post was converted on 26 June 2013, backdated to 1 January 2013, into a limited company under special law, Die Schweizerische Post AG, wholly owned by the Confederation and based in Bern. At the same time PostFinance became a private-law company with a banking licence, supervised by FINMA and still wholly owned by Swiss Post; English Wikipedia adds that the Swiss National Bank classed it as systemically important in 2015. Swiss Post says PostFinance launched the payment app TWINT in 2014.

In February 2018 PostBus became the subject of an accounting case. On 11 June 2018, Post & Parcel reported, Swiss Post said an external enquiry covering 2007 to 2015 had found unlawful reclassifications at PostBus that concealed profits in order to collect excess subsidies. The board dismissed the whole PostBus executive board, the group chief executive resigned, the holding structure behind the transfer prices was to be reversed, and Swiss Post said PostBus would pay back every franc owed, on terms set by the Federal Office of Transport. The Federal Office of Police, fedpol, opened administrative criminal proceedings. On 19 February 2025 fedpol said that a Bern commercial criminal court had again sent the case back for fresh investigation on procedural grounds, and that it was examining an appeal.

For a design guide, Swiss Post shows how one colour, held as a trademark, can carry a brand across four national languages once the mark is reduced to a cross and a letter. Compare Deutsche Post, another identity built on a post horn and yellow, and La Poste, the French operator. For this guide we use a warm yellow, a near-black and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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