Marks Men

MA RK S Men

Storied design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv has been crafting memorable logos for major brands since the 1960s and its simple, classic designs are still getting mileage in the digital era

By Christine Birkner | senior staff writer

 cbirkner@ama.org Photography by Winnie Au

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hen the American Institute for Graphic Arts presented Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar with the AIGA Medal in 1979 for achievements in the field of design, its officials wrote: “In the work of Chermayeff and Geismar, images are words, have meanings, communicate. They make visual images that are graphic poetry.”

Successful visual identities aren’t just brand symbols. They convey a brand’s identity and personality, as well as the brand’s promise of how it will deliver. Logos are recognizable corporate stamps and messaging vehicles all in one, and many iconic visual identities from the past half-century were conceived by Chermayeff and Geismar, who continue to work alongside their partner, Sagi Haviv, at their New York-based design firm, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv.

These famed designers—artists of the ad world—have created logos for brands including Chase, Mobil and Pan Am. They designed the National Geographic rectangle and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority “T,” and successfully redesigned the NBC peacock and the PBS profile— indelible images that have become ingrained in American culture, society and consumption. Their work has stood the test of time, and has been enshrined in advertising textbooks and in the firm’s own coffee table book, complete with a preface written by fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who extols the men’s design sensibilities and their role in inspiring his work. They “taught corporate America how to think,” Mizrahi wrote.

Taken out of context, that comment might seem grandiose, but the designers’ imprint on corporate America is indisputable, and their work continues to resonate in the digital age, says Haviv, who came on board in 2003 and was once billed by The New Yorker as a “logo prodigy.”

“When Ivan and Tom started off, they made their marks simple so they could be reproduced in black-and-white newspapers or signs on the sides of buildings,” Haviv says. “Now, the same bold approach of designing something simple proves itself even more effective, arguably, in the context of an app icon or online. The tools have changed, the format has changed, the medium has changed, but our methodology is the same.”

Art Before Advertising

Chermayeff—the son of famed Russia-born and U.K.-trained Modernist architect Serge Chermayeff—was born in London in 1932, and studied at Harvard University and the Institute of Design in Chicago before graduating from Yale University in 1955. He honed his artistic skills by designing album covers at Columbia Records in New York and book jackets for the designer Alvin Lustig, considered a pioneer of modern

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graphic American design, who designed ads, typefaces and logos, as well as book jackets for Noonday Press and Knopf in the 1940s and early 1950s. “I learned a great deal from him because he had a very small staff, and when I worked for him, he was almost—if not completely—blind because he was suffering from diabetes,” Chermayeff says. “I didn’t want to make him feel too badly about the fact that he couldn’t see, so I would basically do the book jackets [after] he described how the type should appear, without too much discussion.”

At Yale, Chermayeff met Geismar, a fellow typeface design enthusiast and budding artist, who was born in 1931 in Glen Ridge, N.J., studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated from Yale in 1955. Chermayeff and Geismar bonded over their shared interests when they were working on a thesis on the history of typefaces. “Ivan and I found a great cache of interesting, rare material at Columbia University, so we used to go and look at that together, and that’s how we became friends,” Geismar says.

After graduation, Geismar soaked up more design knowledge from an unexpected source: He was drafted by the U.S. Army and spent two years designing Army recruitment posters and ads in a unit outside of Washington, D.C. “The unit was staffed by architects, sculptors, designers, a lot of talented people. I got a much better understanding of architecture because of the things we were designing,” he says.

When Geismar’s Army commitment was complete, he joined Chermayeff to open a design firm in 1957, a heady time for arts and creativity in Manhattan. A news release from one of the first exhibitions of their work in New York in 1959 said that the firm’s design office operated on the principle that “design is a solution to problems.”

One of the duo’s first major clients with a problem to solve was New York-based Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.).

Chermayeff and Geismar were on the cutting edge in 1960 when they chose to use an abstract symbol for the Chase logo—a blue octagonal symbol intended to convey focus, Chermayeff says. “The goal was to find something that was focused and concentrated, with a sense of forward movement. It was a new, refreshing and appropriate symbol for an industry that had no competition in that regard.” It was so new, in fact, that the staid financial executives at Chase initially weren’t comfortable with the idea,

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From left: Haviv, Chermayeff and Geismar in their Manhattan office.

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Tom Geismar (below) and Ivan Chermayeff became friends at Yale University in the 1950s while working on a thesis about typeface design. Facing page: The partners continue to use old-school art tools to create logos, first sketching them by hand.

Chermayeff says, because American companies weren’t yet using abstract symbols to identify themselves. However, Chase executive David Rockefeller, who would later become chairman and CEO of the bank, had an artistic sensibility and came from a family of art collectors. He ultimately made the final call in favor of the symbol, and the logo still is in use 55 years later.

Corporate perceptions of a brand’s logo— or “trademark” or “mark,” in design parlance— were just the first step in the firm’s re-education

of the marketplace. In the 1960s, the designers helped change the way that Americans think about a growing necessity of suburban and exurban living.

“In the mid-’60s, there was a great flight to the suburbs,” Geismar recounts.

“The Interstate Highway System had just gone up, and everyone had to have a car or two, so they needed gas stations, but gas stations were pretty horrendous-looking things, so zoning boards were reluctant to accept them.

Mobil had the simple idea that if they could create a more attractive service station, they’d have a better chance of being accepted in these communities.”

Industrial architect and designer Eliot Noyes came calling at Chermayeff & Geismar’s door, tapping the firm to develop the visual rebranding for Mobil (now Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp.).

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Ivan Chermayeff honed his artistic skills in the 1950s while designing album covers at Columbia Records and book jackets with Alvin Lustig.

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The firm developed a new logo with a red “o” in the word Mobil, which reinforced a new circular design concept for the brand’s retail locations that included circular canopies and circular pumps to make Mobil’s gas stations more visually appealing. The firm worked as a graphic design consultant for Mobil for the next 30 years, designing its packaging, ads and other promotions. “We went through three or four regimes there, and having support from the chief executive was an important thing throughout all of them,” Chermayeff says. “It was helpful to have a relationship with a guy who was on top. If we had his ear and his respect, we had a better chance for working efficiently. It’s always important that whoever we’re talking to about any project has to be someone who can make a decision.”

Chermayeff and Geismar also have had a hand in cementing already successful logos by simplifying them to stand the test of time.

In 1980, they were recruited to help rethink the NBC peacock, which debuted in 1956 and already had undergone one significant redesign in 1975, with the addition of an “N” placed under the bird’s tail feathers. The hybrid logo didn’t work well because it was challenging to reprint and difficult to read, so Chermayeff and Geismar streamlined the logo, removing the “N,” reducing the number of peacock feathers from 11 to six and standardizing their shape, and flipping the peacock’s eye from left to right. The network implemented the refreshed logo in 1986. “We changed a complicated bird to a much simpler one,” Chermayeff says. “We had the feeling that an awful lot of people who are not visually acute didn’t even know that the bird had changed.”

The simplicity of the new symbol allowed it to be used in a variety of forms, from TV and print applications to the cut-bronze metal shapes at the entrance to NBC’s Rockefeller Center studios. “Sometimes it becomes threedimensional, but whatever it is, it works. It’s strong enough that it lives through all of the finagling,” Geismar says.

In 1983, the firm redesigned another network logo, for PBS. The old logo had the “P” rendered as a human face in profile. Chermayeff and Geismar flipped the face around to read left to right, and repeated the profile in negative and positive form, creating a shadow effect. The letters “PBS” were moved under the face and were rendered in a typeface, Lubalin Graph, named after the designer of the original PBS logo, Herb Lubalin.

Timeless tweaks In 1980, Chermayeff and Geismar were recruited to help rethink the NBC peacock. In 1983, the duo redesigned PBS’s logo.

Before

After

Before

After

Designing for the Digital Age

Other iconic work completed before the turn of this century includes logos for Barneys New York, Univision, National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime. Then, nearly half a century after the firm’s founding, Chermayeff and Geismar brought in a new recruit to help them continue to change the face of corporate America.

Born in Israel in 1974, Sagi Haviv joined the firm in 2003 after graduating from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A kindred spirit to Chermayeff and Gesimar, Haviv had studied the duo’s work as a student and read TM, a compilation of the firm’s logos, published in 2000.

“My first class in the history of graphic design was about the firm, and about Ivan and Tom, and as soon as I saw that book, I felt admiration for the bold shapes of their designs,” he says. “It was a dream of mine to just meet them, not to mention work for them. When I was invited to show my portfolio to them, I was thrilled and humbled. They weren’t really hiring at the time, but after a lot of pressure and a lot of e-mails, they let me come in for three days.

That was the beginning.”

When asked why they hired Haviv, Chermayeff laughs. “He was cheap,” he says. “Cheap and talented is a double whammy.” All kidding aside, Haviv quickly became a star at the firm, working on design programs for the Library of Congress, Harvard University Press, Women’s World Banking and Armani Exchange, among others, and creating “Logomotion,” a video that showcased the firm’s design work through animation.

“We asked Sagi to figure out a way to present our trademarks without just hanging them on the wall,” Geismar says. “He did such a terrific job on that. It’s something we continue to use.” Haviv became a partner in 2005, and his name was added to the firm’s masthead in 2013. Chermayeff and Geismar think of their firm as a meritocracy, and the design wunderkind had earned his stripes.

While Haviv helped introduce new technology for showcasing the firm’s portfolio, the designers continue to use old-school art tools to create the logos. The three partners sketch their ideas by hand, using pencils, pens or paint brushes, and rough designs are then scanned and translated into digital artwork. They believe that, rather than relying on the preprogrammed functions of a computer, sketching designs by hand allows for better artistic expression.

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Sagi Haviv, who became a partner at the firm in 2005, was once billed as a “logo prodigy” by The New Yorker.

All three partners weigh in on every project that the firm takes on, Haviv says. “It’s kind of preposterous, from a business standpoint, but it makes total sense from a creative standpoint. We’re in the business of ideas. All designers have bad ideas. Every once in a while, when we have a not-so-great idea, it’s great to have collaboration, where someone can tell you, ‘Hey, if you flip this upside down, it’ll be much better,’ or, ‘If you make this red instead of blue, it’ll be much better.’ That’s how we work.

We constantly interrupt each other, we look over each other’s shoulders, and the work gets better.”

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There’s also a scientific aspect to their art, they say, with quite a bit of marketing research involved. The partners interview their client to gather as much information about the company and its target audience as possible. “Coming into a field that we know nothing about is actually quite helpful because we can see it with fresher eyes than the people who are dealing with it every day,” Geismar says. “We look at a lot of

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It’s always disappointing “when you show something and they say, ‘Can I change it?’ but a lot of times, feedback notes make the work better.

”

materials: what they’re producing now, who produces them. We try to absorb all of that and define what the essential problem is, and then go into creative mode and see how we can come up with the best possible solution.”

Adds Haviv: “Sometimes Tom calls [the way we work] hibernation. After we do our interviews, we like to take our time and come up with ideas.

It’s something that percolates over a number of

— Sagi Haviv

weeks, and there’s no way of showing work in progress. People sometimes say, ‘We’d like to have checkpoints,’ and our answer to that is, ‘No.’ We never show a sketch to our clients. We never show something that isn’t realized and applied to communications. We try to narrow it down to the absolute minimum number of options that can work for the client.”

Once the design is finalized and shared with the client, the trio is ready and willing to accept feedback. “The best relationships are a partnership,” Haviv says. “It’s always disappointing when you show something and they say, ‘Can I change it?’ but a lot of times, feedback notes make the work better, and if they don’t, we’ll say so. We’re not shy to speak the truth when it comes down to that.”

Adds Chermayeff: “We try and eliminate wishful thinking and deal with reality.”

When the firm redesigned the Charlottesville, Va.-based CFA Institute’s logo in 2011, that straightforward, collaborative process worked well, says Ray DeAngelo, the institute’s managing director.

“We talked a lot about the personality of the organization, which should be reflected in its graphic symbolism,” DeAngelo says. “They asked for, and we sent, reams of material, so they could get a sense of what we looked like, from a graphic standpoint, now and historically. From there, they did a lot of question-asking and came back to us with several different approaches.

They talked about what each treatment was designed to convey, and the pros and cons for each one. Another great thing about working with them is that I worked with the three partners. It wasn’t as if they were there for the first

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Indelible identities Chermayeff, Geismar and Haviv have designed and redesigned logos for brands throughout the U.S. marketplace. Here's a selection of their work.

Mobil

Barneys New York

National Geographic

Harvard University Press

Library of congress

Heart of tea

chase

Merck

Beko

Univision

New York university

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

Armani Exchange

Conservation International

Showtime

Rockefeller Center

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Hearst Corp.

meeting and then I was working with other staff members. Not only are they very talented in terms of their design expertise, but they’re really smart businesspeople.”

The designers have learned from experience and are willing to apply those lessons for the benefit of their clients. When the firm redesigned the logo for Arlington, Va.-based Conservation International in 2010, the nonprofit environmental organization was rebranding to change its mission from protecting nature for nature’s sake to protecting nature for the well-being of humanity. Thus, the previous logo, an illustration of greenery with a monkey hanging from a tree branch, was irrelevant. “We needed to simplify our message,” says Laura Bowling, former CMO of Conservation International. “Senior people within the organization had actually drawn certain elements in our logo, and it was very ornate and incredibly difficult to reproduce.

We were being challenged, through partnerships with Starbucks and others,

to even get the logo to take.”

It took time to get executive buy-in for the firm’s redesign of the logo, a simple blue circle underlined in green. Chermayeff, Geismar and Haviv won them over, in part, by creating a short video that paid homage to the old logo while transforming it to the new design. “It took a year to get approved because people were nervous about it,” Bowling says. “Sagi, Ivan and Tom were in it from the beginning. Sagi and I were talking to each other every day because he could tell the pressure I was under, the pushback I was getting.

It could not have been more collaborative. It could not have been more strategic. [The logo] was just what we needed: It was simple and iconic, and will stand the test of time. They were with me 1,000%, trying to help me problemsolve and think through what had worked for them to get buy-in from other clients.”

A Lasting Imprint

Smithsonian

Getting buy-in is half the battle. The designers’ main goal is to build a logo that’s both simple and telling enough to stand the test of time.

Especially in this age of visual clutter, lines should be streamlined and palettes should be limited, Haviv says. “I’ll see T-shirts at the gym, where someone is wearing a shirt from an event that’s sponsored by a lot of brands. The logos

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Above: The partners believe that sketching designs by hand allows for greater artistic expression. Below: The firm’s New York headquarters.

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very hard not “toWebe try too fashionable.”

— Tom Geismar

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on their back are all black and white, and you can see the weakness of some of the designs that rely on color. We start, always, with black and white. What’s going to work in black and white will become even more lively in color, but it doesn’t go the other way around. It’s about trying to find something that’s so simple that it can work in black and white, in a tiny thing online and in an app icon, and is still distinctive and memorable.”

The partners therefore think about how a logo would appear in various media, and whether it retains its strength in both print and pixels, Geismar says. “We make judgments about potential marks with mock-ups: what something would look like, how it works in various sizes and colors. That becomes very important to us in terms of judging the viability

of the design, rather than just seeing it on a piece of white paper,” he says.

“We’re always thinking that whatever we do has to stay around for many years to be effective, so we consciously avoid the latest trend. We try very

hard not to be too fashionable.”

Steering clear of fashion—while inspiring the fashionable like Mizrahi— is paying off. Nearly 60 years after its founding, the firm continues to garner accolades for its efforts, including a spot on the list of the “World’s Most Influential Designers” in Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010 and the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement for Chermayeff and Geismar in 2014, presented by Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian Design Museum to honor lasting achievement in American design.

“The times have changed, but design still has to be simple, original and strong, and it has to work in all kinds of ways,” Chermayeff says. “There are always pluses and minuses involved with anything, and we feel that anything we show, we can stand behind and live with.”

Adds Haviv: “We open every presentation with a slide that says, ‘It’s never love at first sight.’ You don’t need to love it in the beginning. We want it to last for decades.” m

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