Our brand refresh reflects our evolution from our early days as a broadcaster to our current leadership role as a multi-platform public media organization. The changes we have made to our branding—which include everything from changing our name to creating a new vibrant visual identity to refreshing our message—combine to accurately represent who GBH is today in the current era of digital and streaming media.

Our in-house marketing and creative teams collaborated with Minelli, Inc, a design and branding agency in Boston.

We are publicly introducing the new branding on Sept. 1 and some changes will be visible on that date. Other changes will take place over the course of the next year to ensure a smooth transition and to minimize the roll-out cost.

We dropped the “W” from our name because of its strong association with broadcasting. Today, more than half of GBH’s total impressions are digital, coming from outside our traditional radio and television broadcast channels. Our brand needs to reflect who we are today. Dropping the W signals that we have expanded beyond broadcast—that we are a major player in this new digital and streaming media landscape.

We needed a mark that would reflect who we are today, but also one that respected our legacy. In addition to the color changes and the name change, we chose a new, more modern and approachable font. We kept our iconic drop shadow because it is so much a part of who we are, because of its recognizability and the tremendous equity we have built around this element of our identity.

Accessibility was a major consideration throughout this process. Our commitment to creating accessible media—a core brand value—is reflected in every aspect of our brand refresh. Additionally, from a practical point of view, we made design choices about the shape, color, and font based on functionality in digital environments.

GBH is adopting a strong, bright purple as our primary brand color. The color we’ve chosen stands out in the digital environments where more than half of our impressions happen. In addition to its vibrancy, the purple aligns with who GBH is, what we do, and what we stand for. Purple is a mixture of red and blue—the red brings intensity and energy, while the blue brings stability and authority. Additionally, purple is often associated with wisdom, dignity, empathy and equality, all of which align perfectly with GBH’s core brand values and attributes.

We have chosen Red Hat as our brand font. Consistent use of Red Hat was originally designed by Jeremy Mickel, MCKL for tech company Red Hat’s identity. It’s a fresh take on the geometric sans genre, taking inspiration from a range of American sans serifs including Tempo and Highway Gothic. It’s a much more modern font and works really well at smaller sizes, making it great for digital environments.

Over the past 50 years, our audio mark—or as we call it, “the sting”—has become one of the most iconic audio brands. We use it as our production credit and it has become synonymous with our promise of quality, trustworthy programming. We will not be changing it. That said, we have updated the video version (which combines our visual and audio branding) to reflect the changes to our visual identity.
A brief history of our sting can be found here.

The original WGBH logo was developed by the award winning, NY-based agency Chermayeff & Geismar in 1974. C&G has developed many iconic visual identities including PBS, Mobil Oil, Chase Bank, NBC, National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution to name just a few.

As part of our refresh, we’ve made some minor changes to our brand architecture to ensure that audiences understand the relationships between our many sub-brands and our primary brand. Consistent with changes at the primary brand level, we are dropping the “W” from our sub-brands that included “WGBH” in their names and we are leading with the primary brand. For example, WGBH News is now GBH News and 89.7 WGBH will now be called GBH 89.7, etc. The national programming that we produce for PBS will not be affected except for the inclusion of our new production credit at the end.

Even though we are dropping the “W” from our name, our web address (wgbh.org) and email addresses (first_last@wgbh.org) will stay as they are. Although we own the gbh.org domain name and plan to use it, we need to make that transition slowly over time so that we continue to be easily findable for our members and audiences.

No. Our legal name will remain WGBH Educational Foundation.