Chermayeff & Geismar

Chermayeff & Geismar began in 1957 as Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates — a three-partner practice between the English-born designer Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff (then 25) and Tom Geismar (then 26). When Brownjohn returned to London in 1960, the studio continued as Chermayeff & Geismar and stayed that way for more than half a century.

Ivan Chermayeff brought an impeccable pedigree: his father was the modernist architect Serge Chermayeff (1900–1996), and Ivan had studied at Harvard, IIT Institute of Design, and Yale School of Art under Alvin Eisenman and Josef Albers. Tom Geismar had trained at Brown and Yale, where he had overlapped with Chermayeff.

The studio’s fortunes tracked the expansion of American corporate identity as a discipline. Chase Manhattan (1960) was the first major commission — an abstract mark for a conservative bank, a decision that set the template for the next three decades. Mobil Oil followed in 1964, with a full identity programme including gas-station typography, pump-island architecture and the Pegasus supergraphic. By the 1970s the studio had reshaped the logos of PBS, National Geographic, the Smithsonian, Pan Am and dozens more.

In 2006 the partnership was joined by Sagi Haviv (b. 1974), an Israeli-born designer who had interned at the studio since 2003; Haviv became a full partner in 2013, at which point the studio renamed to Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. Ivan Chermayeff died in 2017. Geismar and Haviv continue the practice from the same New York studio.

The studio’s working position — codified in their 2011 book Identify — is that a great logo is appropriate, distinctive, and simple, in that order. Appropriateness first: the mark has to belong to this client’s business in this moment. Distinctiveness next: enough strangeness to stick. Simplicity last: everything that can be removed has been.

“If you have to explain the logo, it’s probably the wrong logo.” — Ivan Chermayeff

Three working habits extend from the premise. First, commit to abstraction. Chase Manhattan’s octagon was radical in 1960 because it described nothing literal — it simply identified the bank. The studio has spent sixty years defending that move against clients who want the logo to “say something”.

Second, revise, don’t replace. Many of the studio’s most famous logos — NBC’s peacock, PBS’s profile, Mobil’s wordmark — were revisions of existing marks rather than greenfield designs. The working discipline is subtractive: take out what isn’t earning its place.

Third, the manual matters as much as the mark. The studio’s identity guidelines — Chase’s 1961 manual, Mobil’s architectural specifications, NBC’s typographic system — are as influential as the logos themselves. A mark without a manual is a stranded object.