Josephmark’s eclectic identity for RCA prepares the pioneering record label for the next 100 years

With a 100-year legacy in music, art and culture, RCA represents some of the most influential albums in history, and today, are tied to genre-defining names such as Brockhampton, Childish Gambino and SZA. They posed global design and technology studio Josephmark the challenge of reinvigorating their brand identity, strategy, narrative, guidelines and website to mark their role as cultural tastemakers and set them up for the next 100 years. The outcome? Eclectic, boundary-breaking, and defiant. The record label is represented through a loud and expressive collage of colour and type. After delving into the archives, they resonated most strongly with RCA’s type-led branding from 2015 and, therefore chose to expand this design direction further. The resulting system gravitates around an expressive roster of typefaces, and is heralded by a tweaked logomark. "We have a lot of respect for this iconic brandmark which was originally made in the 1960s by Lippincott,” Josephmark’s Executive Creative Director, Alex Naghavi, tells us. That being said, there was an opportunity to refine the character designs optically, without correcting for the sake of it. “For instance,” she continues, “the radius of the corners on the ‘R’ and ‘C’ were adjusted for consistency, and the angle of the ‘A’ was tweaked to reflect the angle of the stroke in the ‘R.’ Overall, with just these slight changes, the mark remains the same but just has a little more balance and unity.” With the reimagined mark comes a redefined meaning through a new acronym: ‘Record. Culture. Art.’ – created to represent RCA in its entirety and the next chapter of the record label. “‘Radio Corporation of America’ served its purpose back in the 1920s, but, not surprisingly, it’s no longer resonant with today’s audience, nor is it encompassing of who RCA is and where they’re going,” Naghavi explains. “Creating a new meaning behind these iconic initials was a big deal and it was important that it felt truly reflective of the ways they permeate culture and the arts beyond music.”