What is the logo of RATING EVIDENCE GmBH? Have a look, how it developed since 1998, when “Everling Advisory Services” began:

The logo is a combination of text and visual imagery that serves two purposes. It tells you the name of the company and it creates a visual symbol that represents the business. It is a powerful symbolic association connected to people’s memory. The ^^^ is so similar to a AAA that there is no longer a need to write “triple A credit rating” for you to recognise that that symbol represents a company related to rating activities.

If you think the logo looks like it was designed in Microsoft Word, well, not exactly! Have a closer look: The fonts chosen are the ones of a traditional typewriter, reminding of the fact that the rating business is quite old, with its roots going back into the 19th century.

Oliver Everling started to research the subject of credit ratings back in the 1980s, when typewriters were still commonplace. The logo will always be a reminder of those origins and beginnings. The first words about rating agencies written on typewriters.

The text part of the logo is super clear and readable. While many small businesses think their brand is going to be the next Coca Cola or McDonalds, in reality when we were starting out with our logo, one of the most important characteristics was that the text of our company name is clear and easy to read at a distance, as it appears on posters or some other place where the logo is seen at a distance.

When large global brands get a logo designed they often prepare large brand standards documents, dozens of pages deep: Guidance on the different variations of the logo and where they should and shouldn’t be used; guidance on modifying the logo and what shouldn’t be done to the logo; what should and shouldn’t appear nearby the logo; how the logo should appear in all sorts of different scenarios and so on. This level of documentation is overkill here. It is enough to be recognized. The brand should be consistent in the way the logo appears in different situations. Using simple colours or only shades of grey: The logo appears on screens, business cards, letterheads, pull up banners, product packaging, newsletters just to name a few. Logos that have gradient colours, lots of fine detail, a lot of different colours or photographic content are much more likely to look quite different in these different situations as many of them use completely different printing technology and it makes it difficult to match the colours exactly. This is why we stick to a simple palette of less than 3 main solid colours.

The resemblance of a triple-A or AAA credit rating is something memorable about this unique logo.

One useful aspect of having an icon is that we can use the icon on it’s own in some situations as well. It is a very sleek, minimalist logo, just using a reliable looking font with a trustworthy accent colour.

The branding logo RATING.REPAIR fits into the design of the website. Three points symbolize a rating. Two black dots look like a colon, followed by the word “REPAIR”. The green dot is reminiscent of the top level domain .repair. At the same time, the three dots together – two black, one green – remind that, for example, an AA can be upgraded to an AAA. One point to two points equals three, just as an A to two As equals a triple A, the top grade in the rating of leading rating agencies.

Some rating systems are also understood as a kind of traffic light system: red for danger, yellow for warning and green for the all-clear. The green light allows traffic to proceed in the direction denoted, if it is safe to do so. The three dots in the Rating Repair logo are a reminder of this, with the bottom dot in green.