The Gates Foundation announced the largest philanthropic commitment in modern history, alongside a new date to sunset its operations. Pentagram led the organization through a full rebrand for this pivotal moment of transition, reflecting the optimism and potential in the foundation’s new path forward.

In early 2025, the Gates Foundation made a historic announcement: over the next 20 years, it will double its spending to $200 billion, sunsetting its operations in 2045. By deploying all of its resources in the next two decades, the foundation aims to dramatically accelerate progress toward its goal of saving and improving lives. The decision was accompanied by the launch of a rebrand with its simplified name: Gates Foundation. Pentagram Partner Giorgia Lupi and team developed a system that dynamically expresses this new direction for the organization, offering an identity that underscores the optimism of the foundation’s milestone investment and its role in helping vulnerable communities reach their full potential sooner. 

Lupi has a longstanding relationship with the Gates Foundation across its visual communications efforts. Having developed campaigns for gender equality, the foundation’s 25th Anniversary, the Goalkeepers brand, and annual reports, Lupi came to this project with deep insight into the breadth and audiences of the organization’s activities. The foundation’s new identity needed to balance its well known data-driven approach to problem solving with the optimism brought about by its accelerated timeline. Lupi’s approach was to provide the foundation with an ownable system that enhances opportunities for visual storytelling, highlighting the partnerships and real human stories that are at the heart of its work.

More than ever, the Gates Foundation is a conduit for connection and support. With this in mind, the wordmark was developed with custom ligatures. Refined in collaboration with Christian Schwartz at Commercial Type, the individual letters link together to represent the network of partnerships and programs that the foundation supports. Lupi and her team created a monogram with the same sentiment, utilizing a portion of this form to create “gates,” which are strategically employed as a visual metaphor and framework throughout the identity system. 

The gates are utilized as a tool to dynamically frame the content that documents the foundation’s real-world impact. They expand, collapse, and reorient to support stories, photography, video, quotes, and data across the brand. Unifying the foundation’s variety of initiatives, sub-brands, and partnerships, the gates contextualize how the foundation shows up—as a critical resource and partner, with meaningful and measurable human impact at the center.

Continuing to use the Noto font family, largely adopted by the international chapters of the foundation, was one of the few requirements given to Pentagram. Offered in over 1,000 languages and 150 writing systems, Noto’s comprehensive styles provide visual consistency for the foundation on a global scale. The foundation’s written content must also traverse multiple tones and audiences. Utilizing multiple expressions of Noto, the rebranded system offers typesetting guidelines for functional and expressive materials—appeals to policymakers and inspirational press releases require different visual treatments. Each style acts as a signpost to assist audiences in better understanding the tone and content. Color selection also plays a large role in indicating tone. Lupi’s zig-zag method for color palette selection also ensures there are a variety of branded palette options to complement the text and content.

The Gates Foundation’s commitment to accelerating its mission marks a watershed shift in its positioning across the philanthropic sector: the foundation has reoriented its focus to strengthening the institutions that will outlast it. Pentagram’s work systematizes a visual language that highlights the many ways the foundation uplifts and sustains meaningful relationships with its partners. Flexing across audiences, tones, and platforms, the rebrand strategically embodies the ambitious goals of the foundation while providing the clarity, flexibility, and optimism needed to communicate its impact in this final chapter.