Giro helps your money go around
FHK Henrion's 1969 logo for National Giro.
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The General Post Office (GPO) was the postal system and telecoms carrier of the United Kingdom. In 1969 the GPO was set to be abolished and all of its assets transferred to The Post Office. This would change its status from a Department of State to a Statutory Corporation.
Going forward, The Post Office would operate a number of services which would be under the control of different departments. These departments oversaw the ownership and operation of telephone equipment, and the provision of banking and postal services. Together, these created a complex set of disparate offerings and a multitude of contexts in which to design for, with no governing design policy. In order to address this, Post Office engaged FHK Henrion in a three year consultancy service.
The outcome was a proposal by FHK Henrion to develop a visual identity and logo system for the four departments; Royal Mail, Post Office, Postal Services (Road, Sea & Air), Telecommunication & Data Processing and Banking services known as National Giro.
To help differentiate the services easily and establish a continuity (imbuing each service with some of the equity and goodwill associated with the Post Office) there was a need to achieve both a “likeness and difference”.
Several systems were proposed by FHK Henrion. These offered varying degrees of likeness. The proposals (above) shared a common grid system and combined arrows with the Union Jack. The visual language of inward pointing arrows alluded to a centralised service and the flag to national infrastructure.
The Royal Mail logo was the simplest, four inward pointing arrows, with Post Office then being identified with the addition of a crown. The Postal Services introduced the initials of the Queen, ‘E.R’. While telecommunication and data processing presented the inward pointing arrows as a series of circles with the intention of suggesting ‘packets’ of information.
National Giro deviated from the other logos and grid system. It instead played with a typographic element rather than a flag. The G of Girobank assumed a ‘double meaning of a circular arrow propelling a dot which symbolised a coin.’ The word ‘giro’ was derived from the Latin ‘girare’-going around, so the letter also becomes symbolic. This was brought to life in the campaign ‘Giro helps your money go around’.
At the time, many smaller communities in the country lacked easy access to banking, but often had a post office. National Giro was a significant political effort to bring banking to more people through computer technology and the existing infrastructure of the Post Office. While FHK Henrion’s proposals for a system of ‘likeness and difference’ never came to fruition, it was, perhaps, these unique conditions of the time that saw the National Giro logo singled out and applied. It was in use until 2003 when National Girobank was merged with Alliance & Lester.
Key Takeaways
The GPO was a complex tapestry of products and services. The Post Office was present in people’s daily lives, by employing a ‘likeness’ some of that importance, trust and good will would be transferred to other services.
Creating a unified visual system for a complex service and product offering would have helped leverage the combined scale of the individual divisions to economise on production of forms and documents, whilst delivering enough visual range to differentiate them.
While FHK Henrion was a pioneer in corporate identity design and known for their iconic logos, they were strategic, often helping businesses to better structure and present their offering. Working within a political system presented a shifting ideological landscape that saw their bigger picture idea discarded.
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