Players have a phrase for Firaxis games: “one more turn”. Since 1996, the Maryland studio founded by Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds has made strategy games that are hard to put down. Civilization alone has sold more than 73 million copies and absorbed over a billion hours of play, with Sid Meier’s name becoming synonymous with the strategy genre. Generations of players continue to participate in the cycle of one more turn. 

However, the studio's own identity had not kept pace. The previous logo had functionally struggled in the places that a gaming brand now appears: a Discord icon at 20 pixels, a storefront thumbnail, the corner of box art beside a publisher logo. Ahead of its 30th anniversary, Firaxis asked Pentagram to reestablish its commitment to gamers, through an updated brand that was fit for the modern industry, alongside the studio’s iconic titles. 

Firaxis’ name is the fusion of "fiery" and "axis", the dynamic forces that encircle the creative play of game design and tactical competition. The brand idea, developed with Pentagram through strategic workshops, takes this literally: Playing with Fire. The player is the axis, the centre point the studio’s energy revolves around. The games are the fire—the emergent narratives, dynamic decision making—handed to the player to wield. Whilst the narrative was clear, the Firaxis team challenged Pentagram to make a logo that could be drawn, with pen on paper, from recollection.

The team explored iconic forms from Firaxis’ IP, such as the recognisable hexagon tile from the later Civilization games, as well as narrative concepts such as torch-bearers, toposcopes and cave painted handprints that all represented fire-like discovery and adventure. But returned to the literality of the name and a connection with the studio’s logo legacy. 

The symbol is a four-pointed spark, a three-dimensional axis representing the player, sitting inside a swirl of fire: the worlds Firaxis builds, turning around them. It keeps the orbit of the studio's original spiral but introduces the new representation of the players and simplifies the overall drawing. Beyond the many design proposals, the final logo went through revisions that were tested at thumbnail sizes for legibility of the silhouette. The axes and swirl are a visually robust construction, but as the logo scales larger it reveals detailed nuance in the flames and rounded modulations of the axes strokes indicating the dimensional movement of the form.

The symbol is paired with a bespoke wordmark that sits between ancient and alien, blending classical proportions that feel carved in stone with idiosyncratic alterations that give a progressive, unexpected tone.  

The logo is brought to life in the animated reveal—modelled in 3D, then finished by hand. Fire and axis were rendered separately and composited with a burnt-edge treatment and hand-animated masks, so each frame reads as drawn. The build-in and build-out last one second each and never match, because fire does not burn the same way twice.

The brand is often encountered as a small badge footnoting the varied and loud IP box art and campaigns. The recognisable form of the logo helps cut through with limited visual real-estate, and the new brand orange is punchy in an industry dominated by reds and blues.

The gestural simplicity of the logo is extended to a full visual system when Firaxis produces studio communications. The bright orange is complemented by a grounded neutral palette, and a distinctive duotone image treatment separates brand photography from IP art and screenshots.

The closest extension of the brand logo comes in the form of a bespoke typographic system that is distinctly Firaxis, wherever brand language is shown. The system is based around Neue Haas Grotesk, with a tight and heavy setting in headlines that carries a bold voice. But the letterforms are augmented by a custom variable typeface, matching Neue Haas’ metrics exactly, that is layered on top.

Firaxis FireSwirl is not a font of letters but of fire. The font file is a vehicle for illustrative decoration that imbues text with brand personality. Created with a weight and rotation axes that modulates the drawings to create a rotational effect, the font’s extensive use of OpenType features creates a compositional cycle and numerous stylistic alternates that vary the fire forms across text blocks to feel dynamic and organic without repeating. The variable axes can be driven by CSS properties to allow native animation of the forms in web and apps.

The lead typeface and bespoke FireSwirl are complimented by a customised version of 205tf’s Augure featuring a curation of its inbuilt alternates. Matching the wordmarks sci-fi-meets-runic aesthetic cues, it is used for technical information like captions, data and interface details. 

The new Firaxis identity launched on 1 May 2026, thirty years to the day after the studio was founded. It gives the studio an extensively flexible and dynamic identity system that speaks with a singular voice: always representing the creative energy the studio commits to its players. Sid Meier describes a game as a series of interesting decisions. For thirty years, Firaxis has built worlds that revolve around the player. Now its identity does too.