Refreshed Standard Chartered Bank identity

How do you enable an established financial brand to reflect its true strength as a global powerhouse while effectively communicating across sixty countries? This was the challenge Standard Chartered brought to Lippincott.

The bank has been on the cutting-edge of financial expertise across the world’s most dynamic and diverse markets for over 160 years, with headquarters in London and a unique footprint across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. With a legacy of evolving its capabilities to meet and exceed client needs across this range of diverse markets, Standard Chartered recognized that its existing brand no longer reflected its aspirations or ongoing digital transformation. This, coupled with the need to connect with a younger generation of wealth creators, sparked an opportunity to evolve.

Lippincott partnered with Standard Chartered on a full-scale evolution to develop a digital-first brand that communicated the full breadth and power of its network, drawing in new audiences and inspiring the bank’s existing base across the globe.

The Trustmark, Standard Chartered’s symbol for over 50 years, was redrawn to be simpler and bolder. The optimization works across many dimensions while retaining the bank’s visual equity along with a redesigned wordmark to reflect the symbols simplicity and recognition.

The new adaptive visual system was built to flex across a vast, ever-changing world of content, formats and platforms. And since Standard Chartered’s presence across diverse geographies and markets has led to regional, informal monikers for the brand, the symbol acts as a beacon to drive recognition and consistency wherever it’s seen in the world.

The evolved brand also champions the bank’s commitment to sustainability by elevating the ‘here for good’ promise, giving it a contemporary visual treatment that complements the logotype. Along with the refreshed colors, a bespoke typeface, digital design system, brand voice and a people-first culturally relevant photography style, the new design principles allow the bank to flex where needed to stay agile and relevant locally – a process achieved by working as partners with the client and their network of agencies.

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Super nice work.

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The two previous versions were already clever and well produced. I’m glad to see the sequel actually improves upon what went before.

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I love the simplified SC “Trustmark”, especially the drop serifs that are formed now, but that inverted t-crossbar drop in Chartered drives me a little nuts. :woozy_face:

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I think the mark is beautiful, however I think they should have left the type alone.

I get that they’re trying to tie the type and the mark together with the crossbar on the “t”, however it feels weird seeing them together with the quirky small marks. :thinking:

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you should all realize by now that simplicity is a beautiful thing. theres nothing special about this logo. there’s no real magic behind it. and thats the reality with most logos. it’s just visual communication and it looks good. however, if they didn’t give you this logo on various applications and it was simply put on a white bg, you might question it greatly. especially if you didn’t know it was for a big company/bank. The same reflection you have now would have probably been replaced by comments about the font not working with the symbol or shape, the symbol not making much sense, the font and shape not being cohesive , etc