Nav

Nav’s logo was designed in 2006 by Marc Ligeti, at a time when a digital surface essentially was a website header, and the notion of a brand needing to live inside a 400×400 pixel square or circle on a social media profile didn’t exist.

By 2021 Nav was present across nav.no, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and a range of local and thematic accounts, each with their own image formats and layout constraints. An audit of actual logo use across these channels identified four recurring problems:

• inconsistent presentation
• a “box-in-box” effect where the logo was dropped into platform-native image fields without adaptation
• reduced legibility of the wordmark at small sizes
• no shared baseline for how the logo should be placed

The solution was not a new logo, but a digital representation of the existing one. The wordmark alone on a red background as a stable, recognisable anchor with a few simple rules for how it should be applied. Adaptive logo variants per context is standard practice for large brands, what we did was establish Nav’s version of that practice, applied carefully and gradually.

What was removed was the graphic framing around the wordmark, the circle and diagonal elements. These were not seen as the primary brand markers, and the core of Nav’s identity is the wordmark itself. The wordmark remained unchanged. The circle continues in the rounded letterforms, the diagonals in the serifs of the «n» and «a» and the stem of the «v». When a brand is strong enough, the graphic surroundings can be pulled back. The wordmark carries the identity alone.

We started with social media, where the inconsistency was greatest and the risk lowest. Mathematically scaling a logo can produce optical distortion in smaller sizes. A simplified version is optimised, not compromised. A cleaner mark is also easier to meet WCAG contrast requirements consistently across backgrounds, screen types, in light and dark mode.

This simplification allowed for variation in background colour, even a gradient along the logos diagonal axis, to accommodate different initiatives and accounts, particularly on Facebook and Instagram. Creating a structure where the visual expression reads as Nav across all surfaces, while local and thematic accounts retain room to differentiate.

The adjusted logo ran in social media for over a year before we tested the same principle on nav.no, the wordmark in brand red on white replacing the previous treatment. After another eighteen months without measurable negative effects, the testing phase was concluded and the change formally documented in Nav’s design system, Aksel.