If you’re a nerd of a certain age, the red and yellow Games Workshop logo will be immediately familiar. It once emblazoned the little shops in city centres across the country where you could buy little plastic (or resin, or pewter) men (or elves, or dwarfs) and battle them against one another using an arcane set of rules.
These shops, once simply called Games Workshop, now refer to themselves as Warhammer in an attempt to associate the brand more closely with the games being played rather than the corporate entity behind them, which has gone on to become one of Britain’s great success stories. The Nottingham-based firm shared £18 million with staff in 2024 following pre-tax profits in the hundreds of millions.
So perhaps it was inevitable that, having divorced the identity of its products from the company behind them, it would succumb to the clean, dare we call it dull, logo trend that’s seen entities such as Google, Facebook and Jaguar adopt a line of sans-serif text over previously recognisable wordmarks.
(Image credit: Games Workshop)
The change hasn’t happened to the Warhammer and Warhammer Community sites, they still have the hammer logo on them, and it hasn’t happened to pages like Games Workshop’s retailer network resources list, but it’s on the tabletop gaming giant’s jobs page, and at the top of the timeline it maintains to chart the company’s history, where you’ll see other interesting uses of typography such as the wonderful old White Dwarf magazine masthead from 1977, which really does look like something Tolkien would have approved of.
Dig a little deeper, and you can find photos of the first ever Games Workshop store in Hammersmith, such as in this news story from En World. It’s a different medieval typeface, but still ties in with the fantasy battles the company was portraying. This was well before the launch of the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40,000, but the shop still references science fiction on its sign.
In fact, the new typeface may be a call back to the one used in this incredible effort from 1975, a befuddled-looking mouse under text of questionable kerning that screams of the sort of home-made design the company was using in its earliest days. As the timeline page reveals, a close runner up as the company name was ‘Games Garage’.
Sans serif fonts are perceived as being more modern, something that a company (and indeed human) is anxious to display as it approaches middle age. They’re also friendlier and more approachable, especially to younger customers, though that’s probably less of a consideration for GW here, as it’s not using the new logo for its retail stores. They’re also easier to drop into different design contexts, and this is something the best logos are capable of while remaining distinct and instantly recognisable, and come out well on office laser printers too.
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So what’s happened here is that the consumer-facing stores have completed their rebrand to Warhammer, and the company behind them can now become the sort of entity that concentrates on pensions and cleaning contracts for its buildings. It may have Wood Elves and Flawless Blades up in arms (multiple arms, if you’re in a genestealer cult), but it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a modern company to do.
