Three lines of small type at the foot of a letterhead give away a firm’s decade faster than the design above them. Ltd cannot exist before 1856, plc before 1981, GmbH before 1892 or S.p.A. before 1942; nobody has a telephone number before 1880, and the postcode beside the town is itself a date in every country that has one. This is the research behind The Brand Room.
An audience does not read a trade mark. It reads a suffix, a telephone number and a postcode without noticing, and one of those being impossible is what makes a prop feel wrong before anyone can say why. Get the three of them right and a firm that does not exist will pass.
A suffix is a fact about company law, and company law has dates. These are the ones that matter for the eleven countries the studios model.
| Suffix | From | What made it possible |
|---|---|---|
| & Sons, & Co., Bros. | any period | A partnership. No registration, no limit of liability, and no date to get wrong — which is why a firm with no suffix at all reads older than one with. |
| Limited | 1856 | The Joint Stock Companies Act 1856 and the Companies Act 1862 made limited liability available by registration. Written out in full on printed matter until roughly the turn of the century. |
| Ltd. | c. 1900 | The abbreviation, which is a twentieth-century habit. |
| plc | 1981 | Public limited company — the Companies Act 1980, in force from 1981. On a 1970s letterhead it is the kind of anachronism a viewer catches without knowing the statute. |
| Inc., Corporation | c. 1900 | General incorporation statutes spread through the American states from the 1870s; the abbreviation on printed matter belongs to the new century. |
| LLC | c. 1990 | Wyoming created the form in 1977, but it was rare until the 1988 federal tax ruling and the wave of state acts that followed. |
| AG | 1870 | Aktiengesellschaft. Free incorporation came with the Aktienrechtsnovelle of 1870. |
| GmbH | 1892 | The law of 20 April 1892 — the first private limited company anywhere, and the model half of Europe later copied. Before that date it does not exist. |
| OHG, KG | 1861 | The Allgemeines Deutsches Handelsgesetzbuch. |
| S.A. (France) | 1867 | The law of 24 July 1867 ended the need for state authorisation. |
| S.A.R.L. | 1925 | The law of 7 March 1925, modelled on the German GmbH. |
| S.A. (Italy) | 1882–1942 | Società anonima, of the commercial code of 1882 — and gone after 1942. |
| S.p.A., S.r.l. | 1942 | Created by the Codice Civile of 1942. On a pre-war Italian label, wrong. |
| S.A. (Spain) | 1885 | The Código de Comercio of 1885. |
| S.L. | 1953 | The Ley de Sociedades de Responsabilidad Limitada of 17 July 1953. |
| Α.Ε. | 1920 | Ανώνυμος Εταιρεία — law 2190 of 1920, which is substantially the whole of Greek company law for the next eighty years. |
| Ε.Π.Ε. | 1955 | Law 3190 of 1955. Not available before it. |
| S.A.S. | 1994 | Société par actions simplifiée — the law of 3 January 1994, opened to a single shareholder in 1999 and the ordinary French form ever since. |
| SE | 2004 | Societas Europaea — Council Regulation 2157/2001, available from 8 October 2004. The mark of a firm that wanted to look European rather than national. |
| CIC | 2005 | Community interest company — the Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Enterprise) Act 2004, in force from July 2005. |
| Ltd (no point) | 2006 | The full stop went. The Companies Act 2006 and thirty years of sans-serif letterheads between them made Ltd without a point the ordinary setting. |
| UG | 2008 | Unternehmergesellschaft (haftungsbeschränkt) — the MoMiG reform of 1 November 2008, the one-euro GmbH. |
| S.r.l.s. | 2012 | Società a responsabilità limitata semplificata — decreto-legge 1/2012. |
| Ι.Κ.Ε. | 2012 | ν. 4072/2012, which all but replaced the Ε.Π.Ε. for new Greek companies. |
| PBC | 2013 | Public benefit corporation — Delaware’s statute took effect on 1 August 2013. Impossible before it, and a statement after it. |
And a rule that is not about dates at all: a family suffix goes on a family name. Kelsall Bros. is a firm; Kelsall Pharmacy Bros. is a sentence that lost its way. The Brand Room takes the family forms out of the hat as soon as the name already carries its trade.
The first exchanges are of 1878–80, the trade took twenty years to be on them, and a firm outside a city had no number until well into the new century. So a telephone on an 1870s letterhead is not a small mistake, it is an impossibility — and one on an 1890s letterhead is a claim about how big the firm is. No number at all is very often the correct answer.
| The shape, by decade | |
|---|---|
| Britain | A bare three-figure manual number to about 1922; then the exchange name and four figures — ASHGATE 4471 — until all-figure numbering reached the exchanges through the 1960s; then the STD code. The word in front is a date of its own: Telephone No. before about 1930, Telephone after. |
| America | Exchange name and number — KLONDIKE 5-4471 — until all-figure numbering; then seven figures; then the area code. |
| Germany | Fernruf and a short number before the war, Telefon and a Vorwahl after it. The word alone dates the sheet within about fifteen years. |
| France | Three figures, then the Paris exchange names — ANJOU 42-71 — to 1963, seven figures to 1985, eight to 1996, ten since. |
| Greece | Τηλέφωνον and a short number; the Athens code 01 until the renumbering of 2002, and 210 after it — which dates a Greek prop to within a year. |
Where a country has reserved a range for drama, the numbers come out of it, so a number on a prop cannot ring a stranger:
And from about 2005 the word in front of the number goes away — a card carries a glyph or nothing, because everyone knows what it is — while the number itself is as likely to be a mobile as a landline. The drama ranges cover those too: Ofcom’s 07700 900xxx, the Bundesnetzagentur’s 0152 28 8xxxxx, ARCEP’s 06 39 98.
Italy, Spain and Greece have no such reservation. Their numbers here are structurally correct for the decade and nothing more, which is said again at the foot of this page.
This is the commonest anachronism on a period letterhead, because whoever set it has one in their own address.
| When there was anything to print | |
|---|---|
| Britain | The lettered London districts are of 1857; the numbered subdivisions — E.C.4, S.W.1 — of 1917; the full postcode of the programme of 1959–1974. Outside London, before the 1960s, there was nothing to print at all. |
| America | The wartime zone number — Chicago 6, Illinois — from 1943; the ZIP from 1963; ZIP+4 from 1983. |
| Germany | The four-figure Postleitzahl from 1941; the five-figure from 1 July 1993, after reunification. |
| France | The two-figure département code from 1964; the five-figure code postal from 1972. |
| Italy | The CAP from 1967. |
| Spain | A two-figure province number from mid-century; five figures from the 1980s. |
| Greece | The Ταχυδρομικός Κώδικας from the early 1980s. |
A firm in a trade in a decade had a fairly short list of devices available to it. The wrong device on the right letterhead is the thing an audience notices without being able to say why — a winged wheel on a 1972 works gate, a benzene hexagon on a draper’s.
| Device | Its period | What wore it |
|---|---|---|
| Interlaced cypher | 1760–1940 | The commonest trade device of the nineteenth century, and the one a letterpress house could cut in an afternoon. Reads as a family firm, not a company. |
| Lozenge panel | 1780–1935 | The shape stamped into the base of a piece rather than printed on a label. Pottery, cutlery, hardware. |
| Oval strap | 1800–1935 | The name runs round a buckled strap, so the mark survives the firm adding a word. Brewers, preserves, tobacco. |
| Invented arms | 1700–1975 | A shield with a chief, a bend or a chevron and one charge. Invented, never granted — which is the only kind a production can use without clearance. |
| Sunburst | 1865–1930 | Late-Victorian soap, lamp oil and patent medicine. The device of a firm selling improvement, and unmistakably of its decade. |
| Ribbon and disc | 1865–1945 | The grocer’s mark. |
| Globe and band | 1875–1965 | Shipping, export, telegraphy. A claim of reach. |
| Star | 1700–1980 | The cheapest distinctive mark there is, which is why mills, laundries and garages all used it. |
| Anchor | 1700–1965 | Maritime by origin, then simply a mark of holding fast: thread, hardware and marine insurance wore it inland. |
| Beehive | 1780–1935 | Industry and thrift. Savings banks, friendly societies and building societies used almost nothing else for eighty years. |
| Wheatsheaf | 1780–1970 | Bakers, corn merchants and county banks — and the one device that reads as local rather than national. |
| Heraldic beast | 1700–1975 | A lion’s head caboshed, a stag’s head, a boar, an eagle displayed. Drawn as a head rather than a whole animal on purpose: a passant lion needs legs, a tail and a mane to read as a lion rather than a dog, and at 15 mm it loses all three. |
| Laurel wreath | 1780–1970 | A prize won at an exhibition, which by 1900 every firm claimed whether or not it had one. |
| Mortar and pestle | 1740–1975 | The chemist’s sign for a century and a half, and still on a dispensing label long after the shop stopped compounding. |
| Cask | 1780–1965 | Brewers, coopers and wine merchants. The initial goes on the head, which is where it was branded. |
| Torch | 1885–1965 | Gas and electricity undertakings, institutes, newspapers — enlightenment as a trade mark, and it dates itself to within about twenty years. |
| Bell | 1780–1975 | Foundries, schools, exchanges. |
| Winged wheel | 1888–1945 | Cycle makers first, then railways, hauliers and garages. After the war it reads as nostalgia rather than as speed. |
| Toothed wheel | 1900–1975 | Engineering works and tool makers, from the first motor decade to the last of the nationalised industries. |
| Lightning flash | 1922–1978 | Electrical supply, radio and the appliance trade — and a warning device on a substation, which is why it stops being a brand mark around 1975. |
| Hexagon plate | 1925–1975 | The benzene ring made into a badge. Chemical and pharmaceutical houses between the wars, and the shape of a works nameplate. |
| Keystone | 1900–1970 | The piece that holds the arch, used to mean the firm that holds the deeds. |
| Vienna figure | 1928–1972 | Otto Neurath’s picture statistics — the ancestor of every signage pictogram since. Institutes, exhibitions, housing schemes. |
| Circle, square, triangle | 1922–1938, again 1960–1984 | The three elementary figures. It belongs to two decades and not to the ones between, because the revival is as real as the original. |
| Grid block | 1950–1978 | A square, a stack of rules and one grotesque letter, flush left. Basel and Zurich, then every corporate manual of the sixties. |
| Cut letterform | 1960–1985 | The Unimark idiom: a mark that is the initial and nothing else, and works down to a 4 mm nameplate. |
| Nested arcs | 1958–1982 | Broadcasting and computing — a mark that suggests a signal without drawing one. |
| Chevrons | 1955–1985 | Petrol, haulage and light industry. The device of a firm that wanted to look like it moved things. |
| Stripe block | 1970–1994 | Television idents, airline liveries and the first computer firms. |
| Bevelled solid | 1988–2004 | The last mark family before everything went flat again. |
| Plain initials | any period | The honest choice when a mark would be a pretension, and what a great many firms in every decade actually did. |
This is the fact a props designer needs and almost never gets. A mark is chosen on a screen at 200 mm and then printed at six on a dispensing label, and half of the devices above simply stop being drawings at that size — a wreath becomes a smudge, a beehive becomes a cone, a winged wheel becomes a blot. The Brand Room carries a measured minimum height for every device and marks the sizes below it on the brand sheet, so the question is settled before the firm is committed to.
Roughly: the geometric devices — plain initials, a star, a flash, a hexagon, chevrons, a cut letterform — hold to 5–7 mm. The drawn objects — a bell, a cask, a gear, a keystone, an anchor — hold to about 9 mm. The detailed devices — a cypher, a strap with a name on it, a wreath, a sheaf, a beast — need 13–16 mm and should not be chosen by a firm whose smallest application is a label.
A brand here carries a class — blackletter, old-style, didone, Egyptian slab, grotesque, geometric sans, script, typewriter — and not a named typeface. Each studio has its own case of type and resolves the class against what it actually holds: Newspaper Press sets a didone in Bodoni and Sign Shop sets one in Playfair. Both are didones, both are in period, and neither file has to be told about the other. A brand that named a face would be a brand that only worked in one studio.
The classes have dates too. Blackletter is a German text face until the Schrifterlass of 1941 and a display face everywhere else; the didone arrives about 1790, the Egyptian slab about 1815, the grotesque about 1830, the geometric sans with Futura in 1927 and the neo-grotesques with Helvetica and Univers in 1957.
A Greek firm’s name is written differently in 1935 and in 1995, and the two changes are not the same change. This is the same distinction Document Studio’s judicial engine makes, for the same reason.
And Greek builds a firm’s name the other way round from English. The trade goes in front and the family follows it in the genitive — Ζυθοποιΐα Ανδριώτου, not Ανδριώτης Ζυθοποιΐα — and the genitive of a name in -όπουλος moves the stress, which no rule can do for you. There is a fourth shape with no equivalent anywhere else: the trade, then a sign name in guillemets — ΠΑΝΤΟΠΩΛΕΙΟΝ «Ο ΦΟΙΝΙΞ» — and nothing goes after it. The same applies to French, Italian and Spanish, where the trade also comes first: Brasserie Arnoux, Officine Albertazzi, Talleres Almagro. Getting this the wrong way round produces a name that is instantly foreign to a native reader, which on a prop is worse than a plain one.
A studio takes what it has a place for, and the judgement is written into the panel so it says what will happen before anything happens.
| Bench | What a firm reaches |
|---|---|
| Newspaper Press | The advertisement — a brewery is an advertiser in a newspaper and not the newspaper, so the masthead is only taken when the firm is itself in the press trade. Also the three inks, the masthead and body faces, the town, the founding year and the proprietor. |
| Menu & Bill of Fare | The house name, street, town and proprietor — or, for a printing firm, the printer’s imprint in the foot. |
| Pharmacy | The maker’s line, the four colours, the two faces — and the mark at 6 mm on a dispensing label, which is the hardest test any device gets. |
| Label Studio | The house name, the origin town, the four palette slots and the two faces. |
| Poster & Bill | The presenting firm in the credit and the two accent colours. Not the ground or the ink: a poster’s ground is a decision of the poster, and forcing the firm’s paper colour onto it throws away the thing the poster style is for. |
| Pack Studio | The brand on the face panel, the five palette slots, the two faces and the country of origin. |
| Document Studio | The organisation on the letterhead, the street, town and postcode, the telephone and the motto. |
| Sign Shop | The shop, operator and firm names, the telephone, the street, and the two house colours. |
A firm is stored as a description — the engine that draws the device, a seed, two colours, an address: about six hundred bytes — and never as a picture. So every studio redraws the mark itself, at its own size, in its own embedded type, and the mark on a 6 mm dispensing label is the same mark as the one on a 900 mm shop fascia rather than two exports that have drifted apart. It also means a firm can be carried between machines as one line of text.
Everything above stops somewhere between 1975 and 2004, which makes it useless for anything set after a flip phone. Sixteen more families cover the years since, and they date themselves as sharply as a winged wheel does.
| Device | Its period | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Monogram in a rounded square | 2007– | The app icon, and then everything else. A squircle — a continuous curve, not a rounded rectangle — with one or two letters sized almost to the corners. The single most common mark of the last fifteen years. |
| Negative space | 1965– | The letter cut out of the solid rather than drawn on it. An old idea, but the clean flat version belongs to the last twenty years, and it is the mark that reads best when it is very small. |
| Wordmark lockup | 2006– | A small geometric device and the name on one baseline. Not a picture at all: the arrangement is the mark. |
| Gradient solid | 2014– | The clearest date stamp the decade has. Nothing before about 2014 looked like this, and nothing after 2012 could be drawn flat and still read as current. |
| Orbit · Node graph · Dot grid | 2000–, 2008–, 2013– | A body with ellipses round it; dots joined by lines; a field of dots with a shape in it. Technology, data and research — marks made of a system rather than a picture. |
| Wave · Petal rosette · Lens | 2010–, 2004–, 2005– | The friendly three. Audio and health; sustainability and wellness; and the lens, which can be read as an eye or a leaf and offends nobody — which is why it is the most reused shape of the decade. |
| Flat shield | 2009– | The security crest of the app stores. It looks nothing like the heraldic shield and means something else: not a family, a guarantee. |
| Isometric solid · Stacked chevron · Cut ring | 2003–, 2000–, 2010– | Cloud and logistics; transport and energy; fintech and telecoms. The cut ring is one continuous stroke, which is why it survives as a favicon, a stamp and a neon sign. |
| Spark | 2019– | A four-pointed star with concave sides. The device of the last five years — research labs and creative tools. |
The palettes and the typefaces move with them. The Web 2.0 gradients give way to the flat primaries of 2013, those to dark interfaces, and those to the soft off-whites and one saturated accent of the 2020s; and two classes of type appear that had no reason to exist in metal — the interface sans drawn for a display first (Roboto 2011, San Francisco 2014, Inter 2017), and the wide techno sans of hardware and motorsport. A firm founded after about 2013 is set in the first of those, and that alone dates it.
A thing, drawn simply — a cup, a key, a leaf, a locomotive, a horseshoe. This is the commonest logo family there has ever been and it belongs to no decade in particular, which is why it was the serious omission in the first set. There are forty-seven of them, each tied to the trades that would actually have put it on a letterhead: a coffee cup is offered to a roaster and not to a foundry.
What dates an object icon is not how it is cut. An icon is drawn the way it was designed — a shape meant to be filled, stroked round its outline, comes out as a balloon with lines in it. What dates it is what is round it: bare before about 2010, and sitting in a disc or a squircle since, which is what the app icon did to every trade mark in the world.
Two of the forty-seven were drawn twice. A whole horse at 15 mm is a blob with a knob on it, so the object is a horseshoe — same trade, unmistakable at any size, and what the firms actually used. A spanner needs a hollow jaw and a hollow ring, and a shank drawn in the same path cancels both of them out, so the shank is a separate element. Neither fault could be found by an assertion; both were found by putting all forty-seven on one sheet and looking at it.
The strip of company marks at the foot of a one-sheet, and the same strip on an end card. Its real problem is not layout. It is that marks of different shapes do not look the same size in boxes of the same height: a solid disc inks about 78% of its box, a hairline ring about 20%, a wordmark lockup about 15%. Set them all to 20 mm tall and the disc shouts and the ring disappears.
So each mark is weighed. It is drawn flat black on flat white to an offscreen canvas, its ink counted pixel by pixel, and scaled by the square root of the ratio — the square root because the eye is comparing areas, not heights. That is the thing a designer does by eye over an afternoon, done the same way every time. The room shows each firm’s coverage figure beside its name, because it is the explanation for something that otherwise looks like a mistake.
Two cuts: the poster block — three presenting companies, the credit wording in condensed capitals, a rule, then the supporting row — and the end card, reversed out of black with no credit type and wider spacing, which is what a title house actually delivers. The supporting cast is invented from the worn firm’s own seed, so re-opening a file brings the same sponsors back rather than a fresh set.
Four markets added in September 2026. Two limits hold in every studio: Turkey starts in 1928, the year the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script (an earlier Turkish sheet would be Ottoman, which no studio sets), and Russian before 1918 is spelled by rule — the hard sign on every word ending in a consonant and і before a vowel are placed automatically; the yat (ѣ) cannot be derived from modern spelling and is left as е. Turkish capitals keep their dots: i goes to İ and ı to I, so İSTANBUL, never ISTANBUL.
| Country | What the studio changes, and when |
|---|---|
| Portugal | The company forms of the country (L.da, S.A.R.L., & C.ª), invented houses in Portuguese towns. |
| Netherlands | N.V. and B.V. (from 1971), & Zonen; postal code and town on one line. |
| Turkey | T.A.Ş. and Ltd. Şti. from 1928; addresses with the postal code before the town. |
| Russia | The Imperial trading house and partnership, no private firm at all under the Soviet economy (the works, the trust, the artel) until the cooperatives of 1988, then the codes of the nineties — ТОО, АОЗТ, ООО, ЗАО, ОАО — and ПАО from 2014. |
Every date on this page is built into the room: pick a country and a year and it offers only the legal forms, devices, palettes and typefaces that existed then — and the brand sheet says at what size the device you chose stops reading.
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