HealthPartners is a consumer-governed, nonprofit health care organization based in Bloomington, Minnesota, offering health insurance and medical care through its own hospitals and clinics. Its current logo, introduced in April 2014, is a symbol of three overlapping tilted squares in green, blue and purple, paired with the HealthPartners wordmark. The organization makes official logo files available for news and editorial use through its newsroom. [1]
Design and History
Between 2011 and 2013, HealthPartners combined with two other Minnesota organizations: Park Nicollet Health Services in St. Louis Park and Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater. After those transactions were completed, HealthPartners enlisted a brand design firm to develop a new logo for the combined system. The resulting mark features three interlocking squares and incorporates elements and colors from each organization’s previous logo. HealthPartners began using the new logo in April 2014. [2]
Court records from a later trademark dispute describe the mark in detail. The firm developed a symbol consisting of green and blue tilted squares side-by-side, with a smaller purple tilted square in the center where the larger squares overlap. According to HealthPartners’ legal filing, the design mark incorporates elements and colors from the three systems: the green square from HealthPartners’ old logo, the purple tilted square from Park Nicollet’s old logo, and the color blue from Lakeview Hospital’s old logo. [3]
The logo was registered as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Registration number 5036890, filed in November 2013 and registered in September 2016, covers the design mark for HealthPartners, Inc. [4] The USPTO design code for the mark lists “three diamonds” that are completely or partially shaded, reflecting the tilted-square appearance of the symbol. [5]
Meaning and Symbolism
The documented meaning of the current HealthPartners logo is tied directly to the organizational mergers that produced it. The green, purple and blue elements were deliberately drawn from the pre-merger logos of HealthPartners, Park Nicollet and Lakeview Hospital respectively, visually representing the integration of the three systems into one organization. [3] The overlapping arrangement of the squares reinforces this sense of combination and unity. [2]
In a 2018 report on the settlement of the trademark dispute with Sam’s Club, the Star Tribune noted that both organizations continued to use logos featuring three overlapping tilted squares in green, blue and purple. HealthPartners argued in a legal filing that “graphic logo designs depicting chevrons, overlapping or interlocking squares, and diamond shapes are extremely common.” [6]
Typography and Design
HealthPartners’ official brand guidelines for its Make It OK campaign indicate that the HealthPartners logo appears in both vertical and horizontal formats, and that the wordmark may be accompanied by the phrase “Made possible by” set in Lato Regular. [7] Beyond this campaign-specific guidance, no detailed public documentation of the logo’s wordmark typeface or construction specifications has been published by the organization.
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