200 years at the heart of music - and a new logo to celebrate!

At long last, the brand new RPS logo has been let loose on our website, emails and stationery – we didn’t stretch to clothing, I was always told that red and pink don’t go together. Launched in conjunction with our bicentenary celebrations, this new logo has caused a bit of a headache. How do you best encapsulate the values and outlook of an organisation in that tiny favicon at the top of your screen? The decisions are endless: straight lines or curves, abstract or pictorial, how much text, which font… and that’s before you even bring colours into the equation. Get it wrong and you’re left with something that distorts your image – like a bad haircut, but harder to get rid of.

And then there’s our name, not the most malleable collection of words with a whopping great ‘Philharmonic’ bang in the middle of it. But that very word is central to the Royal Philharmonic Society’s purpose:  philharmonic: adj. devoted to music; music loving - you can’t put it plainer than that! So without wanting to prescribe too literal an interpretation of our logo, if you’re seeing hearts you’re probably on the right wavelength. (Then again, some particularly creative viewers have also read it as a bird’s-eye-view of a grand piano, so let your imagination run wild…) It’s been a long journey but we love the end result, and hopefully you’ll be spotting it around a lot more as the countdown to RPS 200 begins in earnest! 

Helen Pearce