London, 1965.

Wolff Olins is named after its two founders,, and the studio has kept both surnames ever since. Wikipedia says the company was founded in Camden Town, London, in 1965 by the designer Michael Wolff and the advertising executive Wally Olins. Design Week, writing in April 2014, gave the same year and the same pairing, and added that Olins had worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy in India after reading history at Oxford.

The two men split the work between them. Eye magazine, in a review published in its Winter 2025 issue by its art director Simon Esterson, said the agency explored its ideas with Wolff as creative director and Olins as managing director. Esterson quoted Wolff describing their characters in a new book as “the seagull and the duck”, and wrote that the difference between them served the agency well until the two eventually parted ways. Wikipedia says Wolff left the business in 1983 and Olins in 2001.

The review was written to mark a book about Wolff, made by his collaborators at NB Studio, partner Alan Dye and editor Tom Lynham, and self-published after a Kickstarter campaign. It described the studio’s early clients in 1960s Britain as including Hadfields paints, the pie maker Bowyers and BOC, the British Oxygen Company, and said Wolff Olins painted BOC’s tankers red with a hazard stripe. Its argument was that the work went well beyond a logo and a house style, and treated everything a company did as part of its identity.

Animals ran through that early work. Eye said Wolff Olins created the Hadfields fox in 1967, used on the paint company’s stationery, vans and cans, and gave Bowyers a pop pie man in 1968, drawn by the illustrator Tony Meeuwissen. Wolff told the magazine that animals are more relatable than abstract symbols. The fox, in other words, was a client’s mark, and it belonged to a paint company rather than to the studio that drew it.

Two names, one owner.

The studio’s own name has stayed fixed while its owners and leaders have changed. Wikipedia says Wolff Olins has been part of Omnicom Group since 2001, the year Olins left. Design Week reported that in 2001 Olins co-founded a new consultancy, Saffron, with his former Wolff Olins colleague Jacob Benbunan. Wikipedia says the main office is still in London, with further offices in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Olins was also the studio’s writer. Wikipedia lists his books The Corporate Personality, published in 1978, and Corporate Identity, published in 1989, and says he defined corporate identity as “strategy made visible”. Design Week noted that his last book, Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come, appeared in April 2014, and reported that Olins died on 14 April 2014. Michael Wolff kept working after leaving; Eye said he later used a goldfish at his post-Wolff Olins company, Addison.

Leadership has passed to people who were not founders. Creative Review, in an oral history published on 21 June 2021, named Sairah Ashman as chief executive and Brian Boylan as chairman, and described Boylan as a key figure on the creative team for the London 2012 project, alongside the executive creative director Patrick Cox. Wikipedia says Ashman became chief executive in 2017.

The studio’s history has also been collected by institutions. Wikipedia says the British Library chose Wolff Olins in 2002 as a subject of its National Life Stories oral history project. It also says that in 2012 the studio’s designs for Orange and for the London Olympics were included in a retrospective at the V&A in London that examined British design from 1948 to 2012.

A name, a studio and a portfolio.

A design studio’s name is one of its first design decisions. Some studios carry the surname of a founder, a choice that ties the business to a person and to that person’s reputation. Others pick an invented or borrowed word, which can travel more easily between countries, survive changes of leadership and leave room for the people who join later. Both routes have to work as a wordmark, a web address and a line in a client’s credits.

Because a studio sells the work it does for others, its own brand surfaces are unusual. The studio website is often the main shop window, and its case-study pages do much of the talking: each one sets client work inside the studio’s own grid, typefaces and tone of voice. Job advertisements, talks, social posts and short films about the studio’s process add to the picture.

Offices and partnership structures can also become part of the identity. A second or third office changes how a studio describes itself, and a group of partners or a new owner can change who signs the work. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a studio keeps a consistent voice while showcasing many other brands.

Client work, dated.

Wikipedia lists the studio’s corporate identity work by year, starting with BOC in 1967, Apple Records in 1968, Bovis in 1971, Volkswagen’s VAG in 1978, 3i in 1983, Prudential in 1986 and BT in 1991. For the 1990s and later it names First Direct, Orange in 1994, Heathrow Express in 1998, the Tata Group in 2000, the Unilever U logo in 2004, NBCUniversal in 2011 and a BBC logo in 2021.

One of its institutional identities was made for a gallery. It’s Nice That, reporting on 21 June 2016, said the original branding of Tate was created by Wolff Olins to coincide with the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. The same report said the studio North had chosen to evolve that identity rather than replace it, with the refresh rolling out from January 2016 ahead of the opening of the Switch House extension on 17 June.

A later public project was the emblem for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Creative Review said the logo was unveiled to the press on the stage of London’s Roundhouse in 2007, and that a media storm followed. In the same oral history Ashman said the brief came in two parts, the positioning first and the visual expression second, and that it was framed around a brand rather than a logo. Wikipedia notes that the London 2012 logo was later shown in a 2012 exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

For a design guide, Wolff Olins shows how a studio identity can stay plain while the work around it changes from paint cans to galleries to sporting events. Compare it with Pentagram, another London design partnership whose name comes from its founders, and with Interbrand, a consultancy founded in London in 1974 that Omnicom also owns. For this guide we use fox orange, rust and umber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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