FUJIFILM
A photographic paper brand identity with the photography built into the letters
A brand built from paper
Industry
Tech
Services
Brand Positioning, Brand Identity, Brand Guidelines
Completed at
Eleven Miles (now GAIN)
Most photographs printed on FUJIFILM paper have a second image on the back that hardly anyone notices. It’s a repeat pattern of a wordmark. Getting it there started with a brand that only covered half of what FUJIFILM sells.
FUJIFILM have been in photography since 1934. Today they make the paper that prints are made on and the chemicals that develop them. Both used to sit under a brand called Original Photo Paper. But the brand only covered half the range, leaving chemicals lost in an identity that was never built for them. With film photography coming back, FUJIFILM wanted one brand that worked for the whole range.
What’s unique about FUJIFILM’s paper is that printing on it needs no ink. It only needs light. Silver halide crystals, suspended in gelatine, are coated onto the paper in eight ultra-thin layers. When exposed to RGB light, a latent image is set into the layers, invisible until a developer reveals it. A bleach fix stabilises the colour, then a wash and dry finish it. So nothing is ever laid on the surface of the paper. The image forms inside the paper itself.
That chemistry gave the new brand its name, Silver Halide by FUJIFILM, and its central idea.
Photography and typography, together
If the image lives inside the paper, the photography could live inside the wordmark. Photographic textures, known as texturals, run through the Silver Halide letterforms as well as the display headlines. Four variants are set, and only four: flamingo, blue feather, green leaf, and pearlescent foil. Texturals for display headlines are carefully curated to ensure maximum legibility and contrast against backgrounds.
The colour palette comes from the paper too. Silver Halide photographic paper carries a faint blue tinge, and the palette’s lightest colour is taken directly from it. Alongside the blue sit a rich black with deep green undertones, and a muted grey and green, all designed to prevent colour competing with photography.
The FUJIFILM logo sits above all of it. Silver Halide is a sub-brand, so the identity inherited fixed rules for spacing and sizing based on the FUJIFILM logo. It also came with its own set of rules, so texturals never run through the corporate logo.
Below Silver Halide sit two product segments, Photographic Paper and Photographic Chemicals, each sitting within a textural frame that represents a print border, which gave photographic chemicals their own brand mark for the first time. All of this was locked down in a 106-page brand guideline document.
Inkjet prints don’t stand a chance
The technical makeup of Silver Halide products is what makes the brand unique. Inkjet can’t match the precision or colour reproduction of Silver Halide. And the Silver Halide brand needed to demonstrate the benefits beyond beautiful photography.
A bespoke isometric illustration style allows FUJIFILM to demonstrate the technical process of printing with Silver Halide clearly to their audience of lab technicians. This style runs across entire production processes through to simplified diagrams to explain specific elements of the process, such as the bleach fix.
This is supported by a scalable set of 20 precision icons. The suite is designed with a breakpoint, so when icons drop below a set size, the type size increases and detail reduces to keep icons legible at any size.
Printed around the world
The Silver Halide brand is designed for use at scale, running across labelling, sample boxes, chemical bottles, digital, and merchandise. It’s also on the reverse of the paper, as a repeated pattern built from the wordmark and the Photographic Paper lockup. Paper comes off a roll and gets cut to size, so the pattern has to crop well.
Those sheets go out to photo printing stores and digital print kiosks around the world, which is how the photo printing brand ends up on the back of everyone’s photographs. A printing booth, a wedding order, passport photos, holiday prints. The wordmark is on the reverse of every one of them.
More work
Overtone
