Copenhagen is proper and playful, old and new, steady and always in motion. The municipality is also Denmark’s largest workplace, with 45,000 employees working across everything from city administration and culture to day care. It needed one strong visual identity with room for many different expressions.

We built the identity around the same duality that defines the city: rooted in its history while open and accessible to the people who live in it today.

In 2018, we created a new visual identity for the City of Copenhagen in close collaboration with KK Design. The logo builds on the city’s historic coat of arms, redrawn as a simpler, more open mark now used across road signs, letters, buildings, vehicles and public institutions.

PLAYTYPE drew KBH Sans, combining historic Art Nouveau curves with modern, minimal lines and references to Danish sign-painting traditions. Most notably, the two-storey ‘g’ with its lower part cut off draws directly from local signage history. Today, the typeface can be seen across Copenhagen as the city’s own typographic voice.