According to the Bank for International Settlements, there are 166 central banks and monetary authorities in the world, excluding the various US Federal Reserve districts.
They vary hugely in size and power, but have one crucial thing in common: all have logos.
What should a logo convey? Power, authority, history? Accessibility, transparency, modernity? A predatory animal? It turns out there’s a really huge range of answers to this questions, which central banks have answered with varying degrees of finesse.
We’ve created a taxonomy of all 166, with notes on some particular interesting specimens. If you have coffee or painkillers (or both), now’s the time to consume them.
Of three primary shapes — square, triangle and circle — it is the last that “points most clearly to the fourth dimension” wrote Kandinsky.
What relevance, if any, this has to central banking is unclear, but it’s clear lots of central banks like to get a round (logo).
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer variety on display in this initial tranche, from the near-minimalist hipster chique of Botswana to, uh, Barbados. Burundi looks like the logo from an old-school pizzeria, sorry.
Straight out of the gate, Da Afghanistan Bank sets a pace that few can hope to rival.
Sure, at first glance it looks like the label of an overpriced bottle of olive oil you’d grab in the departures lounge of a Greek airport, but a closer look yields wonderful details: the curiously-shaped horse riders, and the cash-packed horns that look like a vanquished croissant piñata.
Barbados comes in two contrasting flavours. Website visitors get the more reserved, staid flavour seen on the right here, while in other places — such as the bank’s YouTube channel — the full force of the fish is unleashed, including dodgy outline and gradient background.
Side by side, we couldn’t help but be reminded of the “My sister and I are polar opposites” meme. We suppose it’s a case of picking the right fish for the job, but one’s a bit dull and the other’s kinda bonkers, so we know which we prefer.
Once again, a circle can contain multitudes. Before we get into it — imagining you didn’t already know — which of these fifteen would you guess is one of the world’s most important central banks? Bet it’s not the one that looks like the logo of an overpriced railway station kiosk.
There are some interesting contrasts to draw in this tranche: Eswatini and Ghana both take on the coin aesthetic with very different results. Greece and Guatemala are likewise similar-but-oh-so-different, while Iraq looks like a better executed version of Honduras.
Georgia and Ireland are both interesting, shattering the tried-and-tested “our name in a circle” approach to aim for interesting abstractions, while the Hong Kong Monetary Authority simply ops for the city’s emblematic bauhinia flower.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate Guatemala though. First up: love the typography (and we love typography). The weirdness initially seems to be the bird, but really we think what’s throwing this off is the super-detailed temple — it looks like someone just took a much larger image of a temple, downscaled it too much, and stuck a bird on it. The effect is a bit kaiju-y.
First thing’s first, yes the logo of the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia is literally a badly-cropped photo of a coin. We don’t understand either.
Again, glorious diversity abounds. Japan has a wonderful old-timey-stamp vibe, South Korea looks like a payments company, Maldives looks like . . . actually we’re not going to say. The Mongolian central bank logo looks like it’s copied from the wrapping on some complementary hotel soap. The thing as the middle of Nicaragua is a phrygian cap, apparently.
A lot of central banks — particularly those insecure Americans — have chucked scary apex-predator birds on the logo. Phwoar, so vigilant. Mauritius, in contrast, has gone for the dodo, the extinct bird once endemic to that island. One for the birding guide?
There’s a school of thought in graphic design that a truly great logo must be so simple that even a child could draw it. A child could not draw the logo of the Nepal Rastra Bank. That does not mean that it does not slap. It slaps.
There’s so much to take in. Poland’s logo is the most nondescript thing we have ever seen. Portugal’s looks like the Bank of England’s except it’s halfway through the shoot and the model is trying to tell her friend which jacket she left her phone in.
Russia’s is . . . the Imperium of Man (one’s a fascist autocracy that clings desperately to the glories of a greater age, the other’s from Warhammer 40k etc…)? Rwanda looks like it was made using PowerPoint. Sierra Leone looks like the badge of middling Italian football club (ie amazing). We’re very charmed by Slovakia (its website currently has a cutesy animated version).
While trying to find a higher-res version of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, we initially thought their website must have been showing the older version. Amazingly, the hyper-detailed quasi-skeuomorphoglossy one is actually the newer one. Per CNN: “[Governor] Diokno said the logo refresh meant to introduce ‘renewed vitality’ and underscore the ‘integrity and competence’ of the institution, in line with the BSP’s 2020-2023 strategy.” Well OK then.
We round off the circles with some heavy-hitters, including the Bank of England’s new “more in line with our values” (read: pile of money gone) Britannia, and the Federal Reserve thick-thighed eagle. Venezuela’s got a nice art deco tinge, Uzbekistan looks like New Balance marketed at Gen Z, and Zimbabwe reminds us of The Chronic (1992).
Tajikistan seems to have attempted a minimalist rabbit-duck illusion approach, where a viewer might see a mountain range or an eagle. It doesn’t quite work though: we’re left wondering why a) there’s a mountain with legs or b) the eagle is sniffing its armpit like it’s not sure whether it remembered to use deodorant.
Suriname’s logo contains eight arrows, divided into two groups: four filled arrows that point inwards at a diagonal, and four outlined arrows that point outwards at right angles. We don’t know what this means but it’s certainly highly provocative. And maybe that’s what really matters.
As demonstrated, the circle is a solid but versatile starting point for a central bank logo. Yet sometimes in life, you have to do things differently, but just not very differently.
These logos are almost circles, or imply circularity without actually achieving it. We’re not sure that’s a meaningful enough distinction to make a whole other category, and hope you agree.
With the fraying of circularity comes pain and pleasure. Albania looks awful. Lots of CBs love laurels. Bank of Jamaica is a crocodile with a key in its mouth, which is undeniably dope, but it also looks slightly like one of those big pennies you’d press at an old-timey museum.
Things that Iceland’s groovy logo could also be for: a recently-reopened Northern European tourist information centre, a packet of expensive but delicious rye-crackers with generous chunks of sea salt, a speciality coffee shop, something involving CBD, an art gallery in a seaside town undergoing gentrification.
Acronymisation has long had a role in power dynamics. Make something an acronym, and you have a shorthand that delineates a binary of “knows” and “don’t knows”.
This often means that acronym logos have an air of exclusion, and contempt. Not all of them though. Some are just whimsical.
There are sub-taxonomies here: Aruba and Luxembourg in the regional travel company box; Mexico, Moldova and Peru (maybe) could all be luxury brands; Haiti and Montenegro look like management consultancies. Austria integrates the euro symbol with significantly more grace than the ECB managed.
Belarus is the standout, however. Why its central bank logo looks like a hotel that hasn’t had a brand refresh since the 1980s is unclear, but it’s giving off irresistible towels-included energy, right down to the middling burgundy tones. They’re truly making swish happen.
Rounding out this category we have a serious “find the letter” puzzle going on. Banca Națională a României, OK. Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası, clear enough. But Narodna Banka Srbije: ???
Trinidad and Tobago is great though. In a simple shape it conveys a C, a B, an & [ampersand symbol], and suggests everything is tied together. It would be cool if there were also somehow twin Ts in there, but you can have too much of a good thing (unless that thing is analysis of CB logos).
It’s a testament to the relative youth of the central bank as an institutional concept that crests aren’t more prevalent in CB iconography — presumably most, by dint of being created in the 19th or 20th centuries, are design anachronisms. Anyway . ..
Even within this slightly more constricted category, imagination abounds — Malaysia’s central bank was founded nearly a full decade after the far more ornate Malta. There’s some incredible gradient action happening — particularly on Kenya, which looks almost three-dimensional. We’re not iconography experts (in case that’s not already extremely clear), but the concentration of powerful animals seems notably higher here than in the circles.
In 1968, the Beatles released Abbey Road and Malta applied to have these hench-looking knights represent their new central bank. We suppose that if anywhere has any excuse for such an medieval logo, it’s Malta. You can find out more about how it was devised (in a process that includes vellum and the Duke of Norfolk) on the bank’s website. Is it over the top? Definitely yes. Is that OK? Yeah, sure.
Square is of course a synonym for uncool, and we’ve got to say this tranche is . . . maybe a little boring. But there are some gems.
Armenia’s logo is kinda 3D. You go, Armenia! Canada, Croatia and Dominican Republic all aim for the same kinda ground and end up looking like they’re from a map key. Kyrgyzstan looks like an upmarket property developer, and Lebanon looks like it’s from a nature reserve factbox sign. Apologies for the potato quality on San Marino. OK, Norway’s should probably be in the letter category but mainly it’s BORING, just like everything from Snoreway (ed: oi watch it).
Morocco’s not-quite-a-square square logo captures some of the same freehand whimsy that makes 3i one of Alphaville’s favourite corporate logos. There a fine line (literally) between lackadaisical and whimsy, and this seems to stay on the right side of things. The calligraphy within reads “MB”, meaning there may be some crossover with the “logos that are letters” category here. The colour choice: Premier Inn.
Who really needs a logo anyway? These are central banks, not web design agencies or PE firms. There is a swath of central banks — notably several that are integrating calligraphic version of their name, that have decided a picture is not worth a handful of words, and settled for wordmarks instead.
You have to admire the Swiss approach. Have a country with loads of different official languages? Just write out your name in every single one. Chuck in English too, why not? Slovenia looks like the logo for a real-time-strategy game set in ancient Rome.
Here’s the logo of the Bank of Spain next to the logo for Roche Bobois, Carmela Soprano’s favourite French furniture and home accessories retailer.
All it needs is M A D R I D underneath to complete the look. ¡Que chique!
. . . and the rest. Some central banks simply can’t be tamed, leading to several logos that are either highly abstract or just completely buck wild.
[Full transparency: you’ll probably notice some logos in this category that could/should have been in other categories, to which we respond: at least we tried.]
There’s too much variety here for broad impressions, so we’ll do this saccades-style. Australia looks like an illegal fidget spinner. Cape Verde looks like that scene in Inception when the earth folds, except in this case Leonardo DiCaprio is a coin. China has strong evil-corporation-in-cyberpunk-dystopia vibes — which, you know, tracks.
Ecuador’s logo is the Golden sun of La Tolita, an damaged artefact of pre-Columbian civilisation. As far as we can tell, it’s a photo rather than a rendering: either way, it breaks several of the boring rules about what a logo should be — transferable, scalable to small sizes, equally at home in colour or greyscale — in favour of something very different. We do, however, feel for any Ecuadorean child asked to draw their country’s central bank logo in class.
Ignore your eyes. Do not succumb to the cheap thrills of bright colours, or shape. Look to the top left. Look to Latvia. And ask: in a world where central bank logos can be anything, why not be the top fringe of a dead, grey sun rising over the horizon of a post-apocalyptic planet?
Elsewhere, it’s a hodgepodge of birds, weapons, buildings and . . . a pen? Bless Ukraine but their central bank logo looks like antivirus software. Panama reached for the most obvious words to insert after “Panama” and decided “canal” was more fitting than “hat” or “tax scandal”.
Well, we can’t say the takeaways from this waste of your time, our time and Louis’s waning youth in-depth investigation are particularly clear, but at least as Alphaville sets up its own central bank (alongside our equity research and public relations wings), we have plenty of inspiration to draw from. What are the key features?
— Idiosyncratic symbols— Animals— Overly-detailed graphics— Pretension— Colour
Here’s an early sketch:
Further reading— The detailed, subjective ranking of research note graphic design you’ve always wanted
A comprehensive taxonomy of central bank logos, with jokes
