Opinion BY Armin

A to S is the New A to Z

Although strands of the company go back to 1996, Atos was first formed in 2000, the same year it became Atos Origin. This month, with the acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services GmbH, the company is back to being known as Atos. With 78,500 employees in 42 countries Atos is an information technology services company — they also happen to be the worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic Games, so they must know what they are doing. With the new name comes a new identity. According to a brand manual that got floated past me, the concept is credited to Atos Talents & Communications (fancy way of saying “in-house”) and Publicis’ Royalties. Atos has also introduced a couple of tag lines and mottos: “Your business technologists” as the descriptor, “Powering progress” as the signature, and “The power of to” also pops up here and there on their website.

Brand video. Watch here. Logo animation at the end.

Pretty boring 30 minutes of some kind of made up show all about the new company. Watch here.

My initial inclination is to like the new wordmark as it combines two things that rock my boat: bold, chunky letterforms and scripts. I’m also very partial to good ol’ slabbies. They rarely all come together in a single wordmark. What bothers me is the basis of the concept, the idea of “A to S” not because it’s conceptually bad but because it creates an odd visual rhythm and it makes the wordmark difficult to read. I mean, it’s not difficult-difficult but having not known about the company before I did read it as “A to S” rather than “Atos”. I like how the “o” connects but does not connect with the “S” and I do love the idea of this very controlled and hard-angled script. The “to” concept seems to have some legs giving Atos a focused way of communicating what they do, which is always tricky for information technology companies. The rest of the identity relies on Christian Schwartz’s Stag, which is not a bad thing except that it makes everything look like a corporate version of The Guardian. Overall this is a good redesign, it’s corporate but not overly corporate and it’s not a sans serif.

Thanks to Martin Deutsch for the tip.

Many thanks to our ADV @ UnderConsideration Partners