Over many years, the many municipal agencies associated with the City of Oslo had developed more than 250 individualized logos, many inspired by the City's historic coat of arms. Predictably, this created an extremely fragmented identity for the city, as well as enormous cost.

The design agency Creuna worked with the City of Oslo to create a single, unified brand, a greatly simplified version of the city's coat of arms. But the creative instincts and diverse needs of individual, city-related agencies were not papered over. Instead, as part of the new identity, Creuna also supplied a generous toolkit of design elements—shapes, colors, grid, illustration style, typefaces, and icons—that can be used to create anything from business cards to sculpture that feel personalized to the specific groups but clearly related to the parent brand.

The basic shapes in the new kit were pulled from the new logo: a circle and square from the millstone in the figure's left hand and an L-shape from the tips of arrows in his right.