TIAA was founded over a century ago to help teachers retire with dignity. Today it serves more than five million clients well beyond education, with a mission to help those who help others feel confident about retirement. Small Crowd, the brand consultancy behind the project, asked for an identity system from which a logo could derive, rather than a logo on its own. The first two weeks were an open exploration of typography: which typeface, what it can and can’t do, which colours to restrict, and which formal element could carry the identity.

The system is based on the concept of sustainable growth. After several experiments, the solution turned out to be the simplest and most formal one, built from three decisions. 

Type: A single neo-grotesque, set in sentence case. The wordmark “Tiaa” is softer and more approachable than a financial institution’s usual capitals, and the dot of the i sits under the T.  Colour: A deliberately small palette of electric violet, pale ice blue and near-black, chosen to relate to health workers and women’s empowerment. Formal element: An arrow pointing up and to the right, attached to the wordmark and borrowed from the idea of growth. It also works alone, scaled up as a graphic device on posters and used as a pointer across formats.The layout rule is fixed: the logo always sits in the top-right corner and the text always grows from the bottom-left, drawing a diagonal of growth across every format.