UNITED KINGDOM – Pharmaceutical company GSK has revealed a rebrand, as it refocuses its efforts in the area of “biopharma innovation.”

London-based consultancy Wolff Olins is behind the new look, which includes an updated logo, bespoke typeface, and motion assets.

When it comes to the new-look logo. GSK has long used the color in its branding, and it stays with the slimmed-down GSK brand, though in a darker hue than before.

While the new logo retains the previous branding’s orange hue, it is now housed in a new shape called the “signal”. The colors have also been inverted. The company’s name now appears in uppercase rather than lowercase in the logo.

The rebrand follows GSK’s announcement earlier this year that its consumer-facing products – which include Sensodyne and Panadol – will be housed under a separate brand entitled Haleon.

In May, the British pharmaceutical company also changed its name from GlaxoSmithKline to simply GSK.

These logo and name changes mark the end of a 20-year brand, beginning at the start of the millennium when Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham combined to become GlaxoSmithKline.

GSK is moving towards our most significant corporate change in 20 years with the demerger of our Consumer Healthcare business, Haleon.”

“GSK will now be purely focused on biopharma innovation,” she adds, outlining ambitions for development in the health, science and technology sector.

While the logo is the most visible change, the new GSK brand debuting Thursday is more than just a makeover.

It’s a wholesale change for the 300-year-old company that, for the first time in its history, is no longer in the consumer healthcare business.

The new branding was inspired by the “striking imagery” from the biosciences sector, and the new identity “features numerous curved forms that evoke the highly adaptable nature of the human immune system, acting as a reminder of the constant need to evolve and adapt.”

This also reflects GSK’s research and development ambitions, which are squarely focused on tapping the human immune system to help create new and better medicines.

The biopharma-only GSK has adopted a new purpose “to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together” as well as a new strategy, ambitions and revamped brand identity.

That does, of course, include the new logo. The “DNA twists” and “precision points” evoked in the ribbon-y three-letter logo “takes inspiration from the visual language of biosciences, genomic sequencing and data analysis, but … still feels warm and human,” as explained on the GSK website.

GSK unveiled the reinvented company and brand to employees first on a live event broadcast from London as well as from five satellite sites with the intent to bring everyone in the global company together.

The reinvention began as far back as three and a half years ago when then-GlaxoSmithKline first announced it would separate the biopharma and consumer divisions of the company.

However, the work intensified a year ago, when the company laid out its purpose, strategy and ambitions to the investment community and to its own employees who have been key to all facets of the work.

French pharma Sanofi undertook a similar change at the start of the year, ditching the Pasteur and Genzyme of old and rebranding as plain “Sanofi.” That switch also came with a new, simplified logo with a nod to the tech world.

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