Desjardins is the name of one of the largest financial organizations in North America, which was established in Canada in 1900. Desjardins is a cooperative, which offers its customers a full range of financial services, including Checking Accounts, Insurance, Stock Brokerage, Investment Banking, Asset-based Lending, and Consumer Finance.
The Desjardins Group, which is also often called a Movement, has more than 5.5 million clients, who are depositors and, at the same time, shareholders, as Desjardins is a cooperative. All of the shareholders are called “members of the Movement”. The Movement consists of more than a thousand people’s funds, organized into 14 regional federations with total assets of over 70 billion USD, which continues to grow at a rapid pace.
The three federations, uniting 108 funds with 390 thousand members, are located outside the Province of Quebec, Canada. And in the same province, Desjardins is the largest non-governmental employer, having more than 30 thousand employees.
Desjardins was founded in 1900, and 1963 has turned into a training center, the Institut Cooperatif Desjardins, which in 1970 expanded its activity already as an organizer of the cooperative movement under the name International Company of Regional Development (CIDR-Canada). In 1980, it was renamed Société des Déjardins Internationales (SDID), and from 1994 it became simply Desjardins Internationales Development (Developpement international Desjardins, shortened as DID). T
Today Desjardins not only promotes the organization of the cooperative movement in foreign countries but also invests there, mainly in the financial sector. It acts in partnership with the World Bank and the federal Canadian International Development Agency and is active in 30 countries all over the globe. Among them are several African countries, from South Africa to Madagascar, Latin American countries, including Argentina and Mexico, four of Asia’s largest countries, China, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and some European countries.
What is Desjardins?
Desjardins is one of the world’s largest micro-financial institutions, which was founded in Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. The group is cooperative, which means it is jointly owned. Desjardins provides a full scale of financial and banking services and has its subsidiaries in more than 30 countries all over the globe.
As for the visual identity, Desjardins Group is pretty modest and traditional, using a simple emblem, followed but the title case logotype, with both elements set in a calm dark shade of green.
The version of the logo, used by Desjardins Group until the latest redesign, featured a solid square emblem, with the elegant serif logotype in a title case, set on its right. The emblem featured a green square with a white contoured hexagon in the middle. Inside the hexagon there was another white geometric symbol — a three-dimensional element, composed of four smaller hexagons, making up a structure, resembling the bee honeycomb.
The redesign of 2018 has simplified and modernized the Desjardins logo, keeping the green color, and the geometric style of the emblem, but enhancing them. The new emblem depicts a boldly contoured hexagon in green, set on a transparent background on the left of the title case logotype. The geometric figure has no additions at all, hence looks very minimalistic and contemporary. As for the logotype, it has switched its font from serif to sans-serif, with rounded shapes of the letters and distinct contours and edges of the lines.
The first Desjardins logotype was set in an elegant and pretty traditional serif font, resembling such iconic typefaces as Zapf Humanist 601 Bold or Optima Std Bold. It worked very well for its times, but in the 2010s required something stronger and cleaner, hence the typeface was changed in 2018.
The new Desjardins inscription is also set in a title case but uses a more contemporary sans-serif typeface, which looks pretty similar to such fonts as TT Chocolates DemiBold, Oceanwide Pro Semibold, and -OC Format Sans Bold.
As for the color palette of the Desjardins visual identity, it only uses one shade of green, calm and deep, and sets all elements on a white or transparent background. Green is a symbol of growth and wealth, which acts really well with the financial specialization of the Canadian cooperative.