The commercial real estate and investment group CBRE is the largest company of its kind in the world with over 90,000 employees, 480 locations, and more than $13 billion in assets. Formed as a merger between the former Coldwell Banker (CB Commercial) and Richard Ellis International, the combined entity required a strong, distinctive identity to minimize confusion with other similar names in the real-estate industry. The blocky, horizontally extended letterforms for CBRE stand out clearly on signs, print, and digital materials all over the globe.

This is an instance where the decision to create an acronym for the identification has shaped the way that people now pronounce and think of the brand—from “Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis” to “CB Richard Ellis” and now simply “CBRE.”