A Valentine’s Day history of the STHS twin-hearts logo

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Tuesday, February 14, 2023

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A Valentine’s Day history of the STHS twin-hearts logo

Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org

An illuminated version of St. Tammany Health System’s twin-hearts logo shines from atop its South Tower on South Tyler Street in Covington. (STHS image)

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means heart-shaped candy in heart-shaped boxes and all manner of other heart-shaped things.

That being the case, we felt it was only appropriate to trace the history of St. Tammany Health System’s heart-shaped logo – to get to the heart of the matter, if you will – which has been a fixture on the Northshore for decades.

Here’s what we learned:

In the beginning (1954-1985)





St. Tammany Health System was founded in 1954 as St. Tammany Parish Hospital, but its now-familiar logo doesn’t date back nearly that far.

Back then, hospital leadership was understandably preoccupied with launching the parish’s first hospital. Consequently, they didn’t have an official logo in those early days.

That wasn’t unusual for that era. Although experts trace the use of logos in general back to the Middle Ages – think pub signs – they didn’t really become commonplace until the age of industrialization around the turn of the 20th century.

Then, in 1956, just two years after St. Tammany Parish Hospital opened its doors, logos had their breakthrough moment when IBM introduced its then-logo. It was a turning point.

“As companies realized how impactful symbols could be, people began to move away from simply creating utilitarian logos for identification purposes and began to put a great deal of thought into intentionally branding their businesses,” according to a history of logos published by 99designs.com.

Even then, though, it took a little while for STHS to develop its hearts logo. For much of its first 31 years, its logo treatment – if it can be called that – consisted of a sketch of the hospital amid its pine-rich setting. Beneath it were printed the words "St. Tammany Parish Hospital.” (The sketch in the above example was developed in recognition of the hospital's 25th anniversary in 1979.

It’s interesting to note the font choice. It is a font known as Park Avenue, an airy, cursive font family designed in 1933 by Robert E. Smith for American Type Founders, according to Fonts.com. It was used on the hospital’s letterhead as early as 1966.

The hospital would eventually discontinue the use of that font for a time – but a version of it would come back.

The first real logo (1985-2002)

The first known public appearance of the hospital’s twin-hearts logo in print came in May 1985 in an ad in The Times-Picayune.  

Although the intention of that logo was the same as it is today – to symbolize the hospital’s compassion and commitment to caring – it looked very different from the current version.

It consisted of two overlapping red hearts, each with horizontal white stripes. Where the two intersected, the stripes combined to form an upside-down teardrop shape resembling a drop of blood, presumably to represent the hospital’s medical mission.

Beneath it were the words “St. Tammany Parish Hospital,” but rather than retaining the old Park Avenue font, the hospital employed a version of the Goudy font family, originally created in 1915 by Frederic W. Goudy, also for American Type Founders.

What distinguishes the St. Tammany version are the prominent cross strokes on the capital A’s, with the first swooping to the left and the second swooping to the right.

This logo configuration also sometimes was accompanied by the slogan “Excellence in Healthcare … Close to Home,” a predecessor to the health system’s current slogan, “World-class healthcare, close to home.” It also was the first STHS logo to incorporate a shade of burgundy berry as the health system’s primary color.

That version of the logo would remain the hospital’s trademark for 17 years, until October 2002.

Time for a change (2002-2019)





Big changes were afoot at St. Tammany Parish Hospital in fall 2002, including the completion of a four-story, 212,000-square-foot building as part of the second phase of the hospital’s New Millennium Project, a major expansion initiative.

Coinciding with the opening of the new building, the hospital updated its logo – although it did so by reaching back into its history.

The interlocking hearts in use as part of the previous logo since 1985 were retained, but instead of using that Goudy variant to spell out “St. Tammany Parish Hospital,” the organization took inspiration from the cursive Park Avenue font it used pre-1985.

In this new iteration, the words “St. Tammany” appeared in a Park Avenue-like cursive font – one that appears akin to Landa Italic – with “Parish Hospital”  being spelled out in Goudy and printed in a much smaller point size beneath.

This version of the logo would be modified slightly over the years, including reducing the number of horizontal lines in the interlocking hearts, to aid in readability and reproduction. Additionally, the slogan “World-class healthcare, close to home” would also be added in some uses.

Coincidentally, it – like its predecessor – would remain in service for 17 years, from October 2002 to December 2019.

Welcome to the evolution (2019-present)





To celebrate the 65th anniversary of its founding – and in recognition of its evolution from a small country hospital to a regional health system with more than two dozen locations – the organization rebranded itself in December 2019 as St. Tammany Health System, although the hospital would retain the St. Tammany Parish Hospital name.

To mark the occasion, it also reinvented its logo.

That new logo, initially developed by an outside agency but refined by Tim San Fillippo, the health system’s senior marketing specialist and brand manager, still used intertwining hearts as a focal point, although they were reimagined dramatically to project a more contemporary feel.

“We needed to maintain a sense of continuity from what had been established while giving attention to how the new design would perform across traditional and new media,” San Fillippo said in explaining the thought behind the new logo.

It wasn’t just the hearts that were updated. So were the fonts used to spell out the organization’s name.

The font Alverata Bold, designed by Gerard Unger in 2014 and drawing from Romanesque Europe, would be used for the words “St. Tammany.” Beneath it, in a smaller point size and utilizing all capital letters, the words “Health System” would appear in Filson Pro, part of a font family designed in 2014 by Oliver Gourvat.

The overall goal was to project a more modern feel. San Fillippo said he thinks the new logo nailed it.

“Now that the logo has been in service for nearly three years, I’m confident that we made the right decision,” he said. “The health system logo has an easy-to-read, modern sensibility that has cascaded into other projects such as refreshed monuments and all-new pole banners. What was once an organization with a dated logo that was hard to render at times now boasts a versatile brand image that can be clearly presented as a miniature digital icon or enlarged for an illuminated sign.

“Will it last 17 years? Who knows? But if I were a betting man, I’d say yes.”    


Want to know more about St. Tammany Health System's history? Visit StTammany.health/STHShistory for the full story.

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