Founded in 1939, EFE is a Spanish news agency that is the world’s fourth-largest wire company after Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Press. The media corporation manages press, radio, TV, and web services. Having a staff of nearly 3,000 employees, EFE operates in 120 countries. To refresh its corporate image and emphasize its position in the global media industry, the agency has launched a new brand logo reflecting steadfastness, dynamism, and modernity.
This is the fourth EFE logo update in the 83-year history of the company. According to the agency’s president Gabriela Cañas, the rebranding has been a natural process, aiming to clear EFE’s image and simplify its perception. It’s the result of the company’s evolution and the need to modernize EFE’s face and make it more recognizable and remarkable, she added.
This evolution began from the company’s first emblem featuring an EFE lettering on a teletype band winding round the globe. In 1986, the agency continued with the wordmark “EFE” made up of eight lines and a dot, with semicircles. Later, it switched to a blue-and-white square motif including the “EFE” with a colon which was a new element reflecting the mission and activity of the company.
The colon has been kept for the new logo as a special symbol of journalism, conveying the essence of the profession based on true and unbiased stating of facts. The new “EFE:” is designed in a simple and clean typeface distinguished with symmetry as well as sufficiently large spaces between the letters for the emblem to be drawn even in a small size. The logo’s ultramarine blue, according to the agency, is an allusion to the global status of EFE as “ultramarine” means “beyond the sea” in Latin.
As EFE’s strategy director Soledad Alvarez said, the logo expresses seriousness and credibility, without stridencies, as an emblem of a state media with a more than 80-year history should be.
