Design Bridge & Partners

Once a brand that lived entirely through advertising, HSBC has turned things around, building a strong, unified global identity. This is how HSBC and Design Bridge have streamlined, simplified, and strengthened the brand over the course of their relationship.

In 2018, HSBC’s brand was fragmented. It felt cold, corporate, disconnected – a sentiment echoed by both customers and internally. The only really consistent element was the logo.

To address this, HSBC made a strategic shift to centre its brand development around a design agency, Design Bridge & Partners, ensuring long-term consistency, rather than relying solely on campaign-driven changes.

HSBC operates from two major hubs: London and Hong Kong. With Design Bridge & Partners also having studios in both locations, along with a network in US, India, and Singapore, the collaboration ensures HSBC’s work resonates on an international scale.

Between 2018 and 2022, HSBC partnered with Design Bridge & Partners for a comprehensive rebranding effort. This initiative aimed to streamline, simplify, and strengthen the identity of the universal bank and financial services group.

Led by the guiding principle of “Opening up a world of opportunity,” the team leveraged the brand’s most distinctive asset, The Hex, turning it into a ‘portal’ for brand expression. By 2021, they had developed a succinct system that was working much harder for the brand.

HSBC set out to build a simple design system, one that could support the business by delivering assets that function across all touchpoints and markets. The goal was to reduce fragmentation, listening to the needs of each market and tapping into cultural relevance.

One way they’re achieving this is through their ‘Living Wall’ — a live, global board of all the work happening at any one time, that the brand design team review on a weekly basis.

Part of Design Bridge’s remit is to explore how they can support HSBC through tool development, guideline creation, or style evolution, prompting the brand team to create short briefs that help advance the brand and explore its potential.

Custom tools like ‘Hextures’ — a generative tool devised by DB&P to create a series of textures that sit inside the hex — allow HSBC’s internal teams to create assets quickly and at scale, stay within brand guidelines, and actually have fun with the creative process.

HSBC and Design Bridge & Partners also saw the potential for the iconic Hex to work harder, and introduced two other expressions: One that removed the bow-tie to feel more ‘open,’ and ‘cropped’ versions that help with layouts and communication templates.

It's still the same Hex, but with a fine-tuned balance that maintains brand coherence and recognisability, while allowing enough flexibility to convey different messages.

The rebrand brought huge upticks in engagement and internal brand usage, marking HSBC's transition from a disjointed ‘house of brands’ to a unified ‘branded house’.