Faber unveils new branding

Faber has revealed a redrawn colophon and new word mark as part of work to refresh its visual identity following last year's 90th anniversary.

It started working with brand consultancy Wolff Olins last summer to create a new look that would help unite the publisher with its innovations like the Members scheme and Academy. The result is a word mark which will simply be “Faber”, while the famous “ff” emblem has also been refined.

Robert Jones from Wolff Olins explained: "When we started working with the Faber team, in spring 2019, we encountered something intriguing: a successful publishing business hidden behind a rather fragmented brand. Faber had lots of different visual styles, and many different stories to tell. We felt strongly that Faber could be much clearer about what it stands for. This would attract audiences to Faber, to buy from Faber, spread the word, and keep coming back."

The company will now use the Pegasus typeface for all its branding, designed by Faber’s Berthold Wolpe in 1937. Its new branding will appear on its books from the beginning of June and across all its platforms in the coming months.

Stephen Page, who has blogged about the changes, explained: “Publishing is going through an exciting time of great change. The importance and relevance of literary publishing is undiminished and in fact has new power as writers and thinkers respond to the challenges of the modern world.

“At Faber we're ambitious to be a defining part of that new conversation, and so we want to be sure that our identity serves that purpose as powerfully as it has in key moments of our history. We were fortunate to find the brilliant team at Wolff Olins to partner with us on this enquiry. Our shared work was rigorous and fun, and we're thrilled with the result.”

Donna Payne, Faber creative director, said: “Wolff Olins’ fresh eye and fearless approach to brand design gave us the confidence to retool the colophon to work harder across all platforms and to create a word mark that asserts itself in a bold and contemporary fashion, across print and in digital. Arriving at Wolpe’s “Pegasus” as our headline typeface allowed us to give expression to our design history in a fresh and uncompromising way.”

This autumn Faber will publish new fiction from DBC Pierre, Rebecca Watson and Akwaeke Emezi, Emma Carroll and Francesca Simon, a biography of Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee and a crime novel by John Banville—the first under his own name—as well as marking the anniversary of Crow by Ted Hughes with a new edition.