Unilabs Brand Guidelines: Geneva 1987, Capio & Four ways to diagnose. October 28, 2026 Editorial Team Save this: Brand Guidelines · Field Guide Unilabs Brand Guidelines A Geneva laboratory, a borrowed English slogan and four ways to diagnose. Two constants: a lake Geneva blue, night lab and reagent teal palette and a Plain clinical sans register. Abstract homage - not a Unilabs asset or mark; no logo or wordmark is reproduced. Unilabs starts in Geneva with branches in Bern and St. Gallen 1987 Shares quoted on the Swiss exchange 1997 The Swedish group buys Unilabs and merges its diagnostics arm 2007 Imaging group CMDI joins Unilabs 2019 A Geneva laboratory company. Geneva, Bern and St. Gallen, 1987. Unilabs has been a Geneva business from the start. German Wikipedia says the company was founded in Geneva in 1987, with branches in Bern and St. Gallen, and that its headquarters are still in the city. The Swiss financial site allnews.ch, writing on 14 November 2019, called it "the Geneva diagnostics laboratory" and gave the same founding year. The company's own website says that for more than three decades, since its founding in Switzerland, Unilabs has worked to support healthcare through diagnostic insight, scientific expertise and innovation. The early growth crossed the Alps quickly. German Wikipedia says a site in Turin opened in 1989, which started the company's presence in Italy, and that the international push continued the following year with the purchase of three laboratories in Spain. After that, it says, Unilabs kept expanding through acquisitions and new sites both in Switzerland and abroad. By the middle of the next decade the company had a clear public face. The Geneva daily Le Temps profiled it on 5 February 2005, describing Edgard Zwirn, who was born in Belgium, as the boss and co-owner of the Geneva company and noting that two families, the Zwirn and Gherardi families, held the controlling shares. The paper said Unilabs had been quoted on the stock exchange since 1997, and that its growth strategy, in Switzerland but above all in France and Italy, rested on the belief that Europe's many small medical laboratories would consolidate into larger networks. Zwirn made that argument by looking west. He told Le Temps that what happened in the United States tended to arrive in Europe about twenty years later, and he pointed to the American groups Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp as examples of where the business had gone there. In Switzerland, the paper said, Unilabs had recently bought several laboratories in the regions around Bern and Lausanne, while Zwirn told financial analysts that the European expansion would follow once national rules on grouping laboratories changed. Colour. A Swedish buyer, a delisting and new owners. The ownership changed in 2007. allnews.ch said Unilabs was bought that year by the Swedish healthcare group Capio, which took it off the Swiss stock exchange. German Wikipedia adds that the company, listed on the SWX Swiss Exchange until the middle of March 2008, merged in the autumn of 2007 with the diagnostics business that had been carved out of the Capio group. The name that came through the merger was Unilabs, and Geneva remained the headquarters. Two more ownership changes followed. German Wikipedia says the European Commission cleared the takeover of Unilabs by funds advised by an investment firm in 2017. In December 2021, it says, a Danish family-owned holding company agreed to acquire the business, and Unilabs has been wholly owned by that holding company since 2022. Through each of these deals the company kept both its name and its Geneva base. Spain shows how the group grew in the years between. The Spanish trade publication Alimarket reported on 28 October 2019 that the Unilabs group, "of Swiss origin" and specialised in diagnostic services, had strengthened its presence in Spain by buying CMDI, a Spanish diagnostic imaging group headed by a company based in Cádiz, with centres across many of the country's regions. The publication said the purchase fitted Unilabs's plan to grow in Spain and to turn CMDI into a reference name in the Spanish radiology market by widening its range of services and growing its teleradiology business. Unilabs's executive chairman told Alimarket that the company was "very happy" to welcome CMDI to the Unilabs family, and that the deal marked its entry into the radiology segment in Spain. The services have widened with the map. German Wikipedia lists four areas today: clinical laboratory diagnostics; medical imaging, including MRI, CT, X-ray and ultrasound; pathology and histopathology; and genetic and molecular diagnostics, offered in European and Middle Eastern markets. The company's own website adds the Unilabs Academy, a teleradiology service and Unilabs Pharma Solutions for partners in the pharmaceutical and contract-research fields. Lake Geneva Blue Reagent Teal Slide Grey Typography. A plain name, a borrowed slogan and four disciplines. Companies that sell to other businesses, hospitals, farms, builders and exam candidates rarely need to win a customer at a glance. Their buyers compare specifications, sign long contracts and come back year after year, so the brand works more like a signature on a promise than a poster. Many of these names began as a founder's surname, a home town or a county, or a pair of companies joined by merger; others are coined words built to travel across languages and markets. Either way the name is usually kept short and set in a plain, sturdy sans or a simple capital wordmark, because it has to sit on a report cover, a lab form, a seed bag, a test-centre door and a website without looking out of place. Colour carries much of the load. A corporate blue, green, red or yellow has to survive on painted machinery and trucks, on factory walls and site hoardings, on printed results and certificates, and on small screens, so it tends to be one strong tone backed by greys and white rather than a broad palette. The tone of voice is steady and practical: these identities set out to signal reliability, care and consistency rather than excitement or fashion. For designers, the lesson is that a business-to-business brand earns trust through repetition, with the same mark, colour and lettering appearing in the same way wherever a customer meets it. Plain clinical sans - after the Roboto type on the Unilabs website. (Specimen set in Roboto, a sans STAND-IN; NOT the Unilabs logo or any Unilabs lettering.) Plain clinical sans · the register Lake Geneva blue, night lab and reagent teal · the palette A Geneva laboratory, a borrowed English slogan and four ways to diagnose · the signature Unilabs. From "new momentum" to four ways to diagnose. The name has carried the brand for almost four decades. Unilabs was a Geneva company when Le Temps profiled it in 2005, the name survived the 2007 merger with the Capio diagnostics arm, and in 2019 both allnews.ch and Alimarket were still writing about the group as Unilabs. In the early 2000s the company spoke in English. Le Temps said the phrase "Taking advantage of a new momentum" had become both the slogan and a pillar of Unilabs's commercial plan from 1997, the year the listing began, and the paper offered a French translation for its readers. Zwirn told the paper that from talking so much about new momentum people had started to stop taking the company seriously, but he insisted the moment had come. Today's language is calmer and more clinical. The title of the company's home page reads "Powering health by supporting healthcare decisions every day", and its about page uses the variation "Powering health by supporting informed decisions every day". The service pages are organised under the line "Four ways to diagnose, one way to care", which groups the business into clinical laboratory testing, radiology, pathology and genetics, and the about section opens with "Health starts with you and continues with us". The site addresses four audiences in turn: healthcare professionals, hospitals and institutions, pharmaceutical and research partners, and patients and citizens. The typography follows the same plain register. The Unilabs website is set in Roboto, the Google sans, the same family used here for the specimen. For a design guide, Unilabs shows how a laboratory group can keep one plain name through several owners and let its slogans shift from market momentum to everyday decisions. Compare SYNLAB, a German laboratory group, and Cerba HealthCare, a French one. For this guide Made Good Designs use lake Geneva blue, night lab and reagent teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced. Explore & save. Keep Unilabs's identity on hand - save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library. Unilabs identity set. Pin the Unilabs lake Geneva blue, night lab and reagent teal palette and the Plain clinical sans register to your own board. Core Palette Plain clinical sans Source & notes. Sources: allnews.ch (14 November 2019); Alimarket (28 October 2019); Le Temps (5 February 2005); German Wikipedia (Unilabs); Unilabs website. No official brand hex is published, so the tones here are an unofficial interpretation, and no product or mark is reproduced.

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