GrandArmy designs the identity for the world’s largest music publisher — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

A music publisher signs songwriters, looks after the copyright in their songs and licenses them into recordings, film and advertising. Universal Music Publishing Group, part of Universal Music Group, is the largest of its kind in the world, working from 48 offices around the world. To establish a public voice of its own for the first time, UMPG turned to New York-based creative agency GrandArmy. The remit spanned identity, language, campaigns, motion work and website, which all flowed from a strategic positioning labelled as ‘A World Ahead.’

“Publishing has always been fundamental to the music business, but much of what publishers do happens behind the scenes,” UMPG’s Head of Marketing Alix Kram tells us. “UMPG wanted to publicly define what the company stands for in a way that reflects the culture that already exists across the company and puts the song and the songwriter at the centre.”

GrandArmy began by holding discovery sessions with 10 members of UMPG’s leadership team, from different functions and countries. “As we combed through the interview notes and transcripts, a unifying point of view became clear: UMPG was the global home for songwriters and a cut above the rest. ‘A World Ahead’ emerged from this exercise and was quickly nominated as the brand’s tagline.”

The agency also wrote brand voice guidelines on top of the messaging and positioning work. The values are direct and to the point. “It wasn’t about reaching one audience as much as creating a clearer understanding across the creative community, the broader industry and music fans,” Kram notes of the rebrand, “as well as providing UMPG’s own people around the world a shared language for communicating what we do. We wanted people to understand that publishing is both a creative and a business partnership. UMPG champions songwriters, helps develop and support their creativity, protects the value of their work, gets their songs heard and makes sure they get paid. And ultimately, we wanted the takeaway about UMPG to be very human and very simple: we are song people.”

Spanning numerous territories and sub-brands, UMPG needed a mark that could flex into many formats and stay recognisable in each one. GrandArmy started the visual system with the logo. “The icon is meant to evoke the four corners of the planet, a symbolic nod to the truly global nature of UMPG, while the negative space alludes to its ability to expand and flex into the universe beyond. It also serves as a framing device within the system to highlight key information and imagery,” the agency details. “The logotype was developed with a nod to the brand’s history, and carefully refined to accommodate and anticipate every use case of the global team, including stacked, single-line, three-line and five-line formats, as well as territory and sub-brand versioning.”

The type system works across the languages of UMPG’s 48 offices. It is built on General Type Studio’s Aro and Dinamo’s ABC Synt in alternation, with Klim Type Foundry’s Founders Grotesk as the workhorse for body copy. Aro is the loud, condensed typeface used for headlines, including the names of UMPG’s artists and songwriters. ABC Synt is the human, archival-feeling half of that pairing, adding balance and flexibility to the layouts.

“Songwriters don’t get as much of the glory in the music industry as they deserve, so the system itself was born from a desire to turn the spotlight on UMPG’s incredible roster of songwriting talent,” the agency tells us of the identity system. GrandArmy worked from a wide sample of existing artist imagery, alongside UMPG’s marketing team. “Building on a fairly simple, yet flexible grid structure allowed us to deal with all kinds of content types, anticipating the reality that we would have limited control over those assets,” GrandArmy continues.

The playlist covers were one of the later deliverables, so their templates became one of the first real-world tests of the system. “They needed to flex into every genre, era, mood, festival and region, while remaining user-friendly and accessible to the wider UMPG team,” the team details. Colour and image convey what each genre feels like and how each playlist was curated, with the type shifting between loud and quiet depending on the songs. The four-corner icon flexes across the layouts, so a cover is recognisable as UMPG at thumbnail size.

GrandArmy knew that UMPG’s audio branding team would write a custom mnemonic – a short sound signature – for the logo animation, so it set the output lengths early. From there, it storyboarded the animation beat by beat. “UMPG’s team scored the final piece after it was fully animated, capturing the emotion behind the story,” GrandArmy concludes.