Angus’ A-Z of logos: National Theatre

Pentagram partner and creative director Angus Hyland describes his love for the ‘beautifully brutalist’ and ‘deceptively simple’ National Theatre logo.

When a company or organisation decides to rebrand, there are two paths it can take. The first is to make the grand announcement to clients and customers to show their new identity off to the world. The other is to do it by stealth, gradually changing things and quietly implementing the new look, and as a result going pretty much unnoticed by everyone apart from the odd branding geek or graphic designer.

From a stakeholder perspective, the first route makes sense. A not-unsubstantial budget will likely have been spent and it’s good to let everyone know the reasons behind the new look. But given that many people don’t really like change, actively bringing it to their attention can sometimes be a much riskier option, and there are countless tabloid articles that debunk the myth that ‘all publicity is good publicity’.

The current (and often dangerous) combination of design blogs and social media means that everyone can proffer their opinion on a brand’s new identity. While criticism on the industry blogs is usually about the kerning or logo placement. When non-designers wade in, chat tends to focus more on the cost involved, but the design commentary is there too. Nine times out of ten, the outcry centres on the claim that their seven-year-old child could have done something much better, a sentiment all-too-often echoed on the few occasions that graphic design is featured in the national press.

99% of the time, people just need a bit of time to get used to new things, although the irony is that if you wait until people think something needs changing, it’s probably too late. After a while everyone just gets on with their lives, and soon no one even remembers what the old logo used to look like. Very occasionally companies give in to public pressure (eg Tropicana in 2019 and Gap in 2010), but it’s never a good idea. It makes the management look weak, it’s backward-looking, ignores the issues that the new identity and the strategy that drives it were designed to solve, and in addition, it’s a colossal waste of time, effort and money.

So what’s this got to do with the National Theatre logo? The version of the logo shown here was designed by Ian Dennis in 1974, while working in the studio of FHK Henrion. Henrion had designed a more traditional concept formed from several Union Jack motifs, but passed the task onto his studio mate. Dennis created a beautifully brutalist logo that would sit perfectly with the NT’s beautifully brutalist Denys Lasdun building. Deceptively simple, it’s a sophisticated stencil design that shares similarities with Alan Flecther’s more recent V&A logo.

However, unlike the V&A logo, which is still in use, Ian Dennis’s NT logo has been quietly retired. It’s still visible around the building (especially in signage), but was gently phased out from 2012 onwards. The process was so gradual that no one really noticed that the NT identity had been replaced by the new dramatically streamlined wordmark, which is set in Helvetica.

In the last few years, the original NT logo (like the building itself) has become something of a favourite among designers, and no doubt there would have been a big outcry if the theatre had made a big thing of its demise. So, another classic logo has quietly bitten the dust, replaced by something that’s perfectly acceptable and much less controversial. It could be said that, like the output of the National itself, the new logo is somewhat vanilla, while still remaining very much a design classic.

Next time, a logo that’s best consumed with an olive (or a twist).