17 Oct
2026
Most rebrands try to look new. The one the Poetry Foundation unveiled on September 28 tries to look alive. Working with Pentagram partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos, the Chicago institution and its magazine, Poetry, have given their long-serving emblem a Pegasus that stands, raises a hoof, rears and takes flight. The October 2026 issue is the first to carry the new system, and the rollout continues across the Foundation's digital channels, its building and the magazine through fall 2026.
It is a modest project by the standards of global corporate identities, but it is one of the more thoughtful pieces of creative direction released this autumn, and it offers a clear lesson for any brand with a long history and a recognisable symbol: you do not have to throw the symbol away to make it feel current. You can give it a range of motion.
According to the Foundation's announcement, the rebrand was led by its own creative director, Fred Sasaki, together with Trabucco-Campos and the Pentagram team. The headline elements are:
Sasaki said the aim was an identity that is "big, bright, and beautiful in itself." The timing is deliberate: the Foundation is approaching its 25th anniversary in 2027.
Heritage symbols carry equity that is very hard to rebuild. A winged horse that has sat on a magazine since 1912 is the kind of asset most brands would pay heavily to manufacture. The common mistake in rebranding is to treat that history as baggage, simplify the mark until it is generic, and lose the recognition in the process.
Pentagram's answer is to keep the creature and change its behaviour. Four poses give the identity something closer to a vocabulary than a logo. A standing Pegasus can sign off a formal grant document; a rearing one can anchor a poster for a reading; a flying one can lead a social post or a building banner. The Foundation says the poses give the logo character and movement, and that is the practical point: a brand that has to speak across a print magazine, public programmes, grantmaking and digital platforms needs more than one tone of voice.
This is a pattern worth noticing well beyond the arts. Brands that live in many contexts at once increasingly favour flexible systems over a single locked-up mark. The Pegasus approach shows how to do that without inventing a new character from scratch.
The cover change may be the most interesting decision in the project. Since 2018, Pentagram's identity programme for the magazine invited a guest designer to reinterpret the letters P-O-E-T-R-Y for each cover. For the November 2024 issue, for example, Trabucco-Campos and his team rendered the word in "weathered stone letterforms" as a tribute to poetry as an ancient art form.
That programme made the magazine's name the canvas. The new direction moves the canvas to the content. Editor-in-chief Adrian Matejka said the excerpts give readers a glimpse of each issue's language, rhythm and spirit. In creative direction terms, it is a shift from brand-as-container to brand-as-sample: instead of telling readers what the publication is called, the cover shows them what it sounds like.
There is a quiet confidence in that. Only a title with real recognition can afford to let its own name recede. The redesign trusts the Pegasus and the familiar format to do the identifying work, which frees the cover to do the selling.
The type choices reinforce the same idea. Building the system around a family of Times faces, including the ubiquitous Times New Roman on the web, ties the identity to the most familiar typographic voice of print reading. It is literary without being precious, and it reads as editorial rather than corporate. Pairing those faces with Noto Sans and Noto Serif online is also a practical decision, since the Noto family was built for broad language coverage, which matters for any publisher whose audience reads across languages.
Nothing about the typography will make headlines on its own, and that is a strength. The expressive load sits with the colour, the illustrations and the moving horse. The type holds the system together.
The Poetry Foundation is not a small literary nonprofit. It was established in 2003, after a bequest from philanthropist Ruth Lilly to its predecessor, the Modern Poetry Association, that later grew to about $200 million, and its Chicago headquarters, designed by John Ronan, opened in 2011, according to its Wikipedia entry. Poetry magazine itself was founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912. The Foundation says its relationship with Pentagram goes back to 2016, when Michael Bierut redesigned the brand.
That scale explains the brief. An organisation running a magazine, a library, public events, signage and grants needs one system that can stretch across all of them, and an anniversary is the natural moment to make that case.
The real test will come over the next year as the identity moves from launch materials into everyday use: monthly covers, building signage and the 25th-anniversary programming in 2027. Flexible systems can drift into inconsistency if they are not managed carefully, so the discipline of the in-house team will matter as much as Pentagram's design. If it holds, the Pegasus rebrand will be a strong case study in how a century-old symbol can be made to move again.
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