PKF launches fresh branding at Asia Pacific meeting in Australia
PKF has taken the opportunity of its recent regional Asia Pacific meeting on the Gold Coast to officially launch a new brand identity – featuring a refreshed logo, colours and lettering.
Global accounting and consulting network PKF has unveiled its new logo and brand identity at the network’s recent Asia Pacific regional summit in Australia – the origin of one of PKF’s four founding member firms upon the association’s establishment in 1969.
Now, a half a century later, PKF has updated its logo to better reflect the diversity of its 220-strong membership, adding a multi-coloured disk with overlapping wedges.
As its first in-person event since 2019, PKF’s Asia Pacific regional meeting on the Gold Coast attracted a record number of attendees, including global CEO Theo Vermaak and international chair Christos Antoniou, who came together to discuss the network's performance and strategy amid an evolving accounting landscape.
PKF also took the opportunity to officially launch its new branding, which includes a refreshed logo, colour palette and custom typeface.
In approaching the year-long project (which was led by London-based brand and communications heads Sarah Allman and Heather Newby, with support from design agency Ascend Studios), PKF sought the input of its global membership on what the firm meant to them, looking for a meaningful identity which could accurately reflect the diversity within a firm spanning some 150 countries, its clientele, and the broad range of services on offer.
The response, the firm says, was beautiful in its simplicity, with members sharing their sense of belonging to a community “built on trust and a common desire to deliver excellence in a practical way.”
PKF’s overhauled brand behaviours, personality, tone, style and identity were subsequently born from that sentiment, intended to convey a unified commitment to “driving change, acting with togetherness, staying human, and embracing equity.”
Gone is the simple royal blue and white colour scheme of old, replaced with a multitude of shades roughly corresponding to those of a rainbow, which are arranged as an overlapping circle of pie slices around a cut-out centre to give the sense of movement – a reflection of “a community that is constantly evolving and adapting”. The spiky, harder-edged tips of the former ‘PKF’ lettering have also given way to a flatter, more rounded custom font.
“Our visual identity is confident and approachable, and represents the five regions within our global community,” the firm stated. “The sections within the icon overlap, as do our ambitions and aspirations. We are as diverse as our colour palette suggests and we have respected our members’ inherent love of vibrant colours. Our typography reflects our softer side and pays tribute to those small, human interactions that make the big things possible.”
PKF becomes the latest in a string of mid-tier accounting and consulting firms to launch a new identity in recent years as the global networks seek greater alignment, following among others Mazars, Moore, Baker Tilly, HLB, and Crowe.
Many of the world’s leading management consultancies, including McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Arthur D. Little, and Kearney, have also recently reset their brand in an effort to reflect a changing industry.
