NBC And Pan Am Designers On How They Made Some Of The World’s Most Iconic Logos

Think of a famous 20th-century logo, and chances are Chermayeff & Geismar designed it: Pan Am, NBC, Chase, Mobil, PBS, National Geographic, Barneys, AX, the Museum of Modern Art. The list goes on ad infinitum. Now, more than 50 years after Yale grads Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar founded their wildly influential branding and graphic design studio in New York, the two partners–along with Sagi Haviv, who became the firm’s third partner in 2007– are set to release a monograph that covers the principles of identity design, using their own trademarks as case studies. Above, we’ve excerpted parts of Identify to give an exclusive look at how Chermayeff & Geismar designed some of the most elegant, and memorable, logos of our time.