Chermayeff & Geismar (Ivan Chermayeff, Tom Geismar)

1. What it is — a corporate mark for Chase Manhattan Bank (merger of Chase National and Bank of the Manhattan Company). Publicly presented 21.11.1960 (Logo Histories); cghnyc.com and the firm's Wikipedia write „since 1961" — a difference between presentation and full rollout, documented. Alongside the mark, a purpose-built grotesque in two cuts, condensed and extended, so foreign subsidiaries could keep their name alongside the shared mark. In 2004/05 simplified to a solid blue octagon.
2. Composition — four trapezoidal wedges around an empty square; the outer outline is a regular octagon, the inner square is rotated 45° relative to the wedges. Sketches at cghnyc.com show the path: Chinese coin (circle in a square grid) → square in octagon → four wedges. The emptiness is the load-bearing element: the square that no one drew is the „vault" (cghnyc.com) and the only place the eye can rest. The wedges have a slight offset (each is „pushed" clockwise), so a static figure gains rotation — „motion and dynamism, even a hint of three-dimensionality".
3. Colour — one: blue, official; plus black and a line version for newsprint. The mark is drawn to work in a single colour on poor paper; colour is policy, not composition.
4. Typography — a purpose-built grotesque alongside the mark (Logo Histories); specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — nothing literal; Geismar: they couldn't find a symbol of banking „that wasn't a dollar, or a pound sign" (Creative Review), so they gave up on depiction. The mark is a „blank vessel" into which the company pours meaning (99% Invisible) — and that's possible only because Chase has the money to show it millions of times. The five-metre test: the outline reads as one closed geometric shape; the three-second test: you recognise it without knowing why.
6. Why exactly this way — two cultures to be merged without favouring either (no old emblem), an awkwardly long name to be replaced, and a scale from a cheque to a 60-storey façade. Abstraction solves all three; abstraction without a budget for repetition would have solved none.
7. What would kill it — closing the square (filling the emptiness) or adding an initial C in the centre. Both would turn it into „just another octagon"; the rotation of the wedges disappears.

Principles: bijeli-prostor-kao-oblik prazan-znak-puni-klijent identitet-je-prirucnik To verify against the image: the exact offset of the wedges (how many degrees) and the hex of the blue — from the original manual, not from the web.

1. What it is — an identification programme for Mobil Oil: a logotype in a purpose-built alphabet, a redrawn Pegasus, colour policy, integration with Eliot Noyes's station architecture; packaging, vehicles, print, posters, signage, standards for the whole world. Geismar: „not only the logo and a special alphabet, but also an extensive design program that kept us very involved for some 30 years" (designboom). Eye 81: three decades on „four basic ideas".
2. Composition — five letters of equal weight, geometric, sans serif; only the O is red and a perfect circle, the rest blue. The circle in the word is the same circle as the round canopies, round pumps and round displays at the station — „the idea of the red O reinforces a design concept to use circular canopies, pumps, and display elements" (cghnyc.com). The logotype is, then, a cross-section of the architecture. The Pegasus stands separate: red on a white disc, on a blue field, large on the building itself.
3. Colour — two: blue and red on white. Red only on one letter and on the horse — so red = Mobil at any distance, and blue = text.
4. Typography — Mobil Alphabet, purpose-built, single-weight (Eye 81). Not Futura, though it resembles it — class of geometric grotesque (sans serif).
5. Message — the red O teaches pronunciation: „Mo-bil, not Mo-bile" (cghnyc.com). From the road, at night, under the canopy: one red circle in a blue word. The word and the object say the same thing.
6. Why exactly this way — the client is building thousands of stations; the identity must survive contractors, years and local regulations. Hence a rule (circle, two colours, alphabet), not a finished drawing. This is the cleanest case of identitet-je-prirucnik after Otl Aicher.
7. What would kill it — a second red letter, or a gradient on the O „to make it look like the sun". A programme stops being a programme the moment another element demands attention.

Principles: identitet-je-prirucnik program-umjesto-artefakta ravna-boja-na-daljinu To verify against the image: the year the red O was introduced (1964 or 1965/66 — sources differ between „Mobil 1964" and the completion of the programme with Noyes).

1. What it is — poster for their own exhibition, lithograph, 55.2 × 70.4 cm (MoMA; in the image the format is upright, so the measurement is probably w × h — to verify). MoMA also lists Bruce Blackburn as a co-author, which is suspicious for 1960 (Blackburn comes later) — likely a record error, noted. Related record: A Return Exhibition… at Gallery 303, The Composing Room (MoMA 155374, 1959).
2. Composition — black field; across it about 40 torn scraps of paper (white, beige, grey), each with text (typewriter, small type, handwritten), arranged in a loose grid of five columns. Nothing is aligned precisely; the grid reads from density, not from edges. The title line is one small row at the bottom. The eye wanders — which is the intent: the poster is a catalogue of fragments, not a single image.
3. Colour — two values: black ground, light paper. No accent.
4. Typography — the text on the scraps is found (memos, notes), not set for the poster; typewriter and small-type class.
5. Message — "this is our worktable": the scraps of paper are what the studio actually works with. At five metres: a dark plane with texture; at half a metre: you read sentences. The same thing Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita) and Herb Lubalin do with two audiences, here without a single bold word.
6. Why exactly this way — an exhibition of designers who have no "style" but a method; the poster must not resemble any of their own work, so it shows the waste of their work. The Brownjohn line (typography as texture, Eye 4) is visible.
7. What would kill it — aligning the scraps flat into a clean grid. The torn edge is the argument; a straight edge would turn it into a table.

Principles: mreza-drzi-haos jeftina-tehnika-kao-jezik To verify against the image: what is written on the scraps (rejected drafts? client notes?) — from the screenshot illegible; MoMA has no caption.

1. What it is — poster, offset, 106.8 × 71.1 cm; Chermayeff, Geismar, Blackburn; client National Park Service (credit at the bottom). Gift of Chermayeff to MoMA in 1977.
2. Composition — photograph: about 15 souvenir Statue of Liberty figurines of different sizes and materials (copper, white plaster, pink plastic, brown, black, gold) crammed into a mass that fills the bottom two-thirds; all raise their torch, so the mass has one direction — up-right. The text runs in a single line along the angle of the torches, white, small, as if the statues were holding it. The top third is empty blue.
3. Colour — blue ground (sky without sky: flat) and the motley of the objects. Not one souvenir is the "correct" copper-green — all are the "wrong" colours, and that's the point.
4. Typography — white grotesque, one line, rotated; class only.
5. Message — a museum of immigration: the statue multiplied in cheap copies that immigrants used to buy. Many colours, one gesture. At five metres: a crowd of figures waving; at half a metre: kitsch. The message lies in the choice of objects, not in the composing.
6. Why exactly this way — the subject (immigration) is slippery to illustrate; found objects from the souvenir shop are evidence, not opinion (Emory Douglas's rule, here applied for the state).
7. What would kill it — one statue, the real one, green. Multiplicity and the wrong colours are the entire content.

Principles: nadjeni-predmet-kao-rijec fotografija-umjesto-ilustracije jedna-slika-jedna-rijec To verify against the image: the signature at bottom right (white, italic) — whose it is.

1. What it is — poster for an exhibition in Philadelphia for the bicentennial, offset, 106.7 × 71.2 cm; Chermayeff, Geismar, Blackburn.
2. Composition — white field divided into two registers. Top (~40%): one enormous pen signature, black ink, with a flourish rising across the full width; beneath it a small drawn quill (red tip, green shaft) laid horizontally like a rule. Bottom (~50%): a rectangle with a thin orange-red frame — inside it, parchment sheets, two round seals and the same signature repeated small. Below the frame the title in a single line. The eye moves: signature → quill → document → title, top to bottom.
3. Colour — white, black, one warm colour (frame and quill tip), the beige of the parchment. Colour marks only "exhibit" (frame) and "tool" (quill).
4. Typography — title in a small serif; the document in period calligraphy — found material, not typesetting.
5. Message — "Reflections": the signature above is reflected in the document below — one gesture and its trace. At five metres: one black calligraphic mark on white; at half a metre: you read whose it is.
6. Why exactly this way — a state jubilee pulls toward flags and eagles; the studio (the same one that did the US Bicentennial mark) takes the smallest object of the event — a signature — and blows it up into an abstract drawing. The disproportion between the signature and the document is the entire dramaturgy.
7. What would kill it — an enlarged portrait of the signer above the document. The signature is abstract; a portrait would be illustration.

Principles: gest-rukom-nasuprot-rezu ekstremna-nesrazmjera-mjerila (conditional — drawing, not photograph) nadjeni-predmet-kao-rijec To verify against the image: whose signature it is (Hancock?); what is inside the frame — a replica of documents or an exhibition plan.

1. What it is — poster for a 16-episode TV series (American diplomatic history from Versailles to Pearl Harbor, hosted by Eric Sevareid, Channel 5), offset, 116.8 × 76.3 cm; Chermayeff, Geismar, Blackburn.
2. Composition — white field, one central vertical: World War One helmet / BETWEEN / civilian hat / THE WARS / World War Two helmet. Three photographed objects and two lines of type alternate, equal spacing. A header "Mobil Showcase presents" at top, three lines of credits and the Mobil logotype at bottom, small. The word BETWEEN sits literally between the helmet and the hat: the sentence is also the layout.
3. Colour — white ground; letters red; objects in their own colours (brown, dark grey, olive), no background, with a small shadow.
4. Typography — spaced serif capitals (Didone/transitional class, thin serifs), red; Mobil Alphabet for the header. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — peacetime is the hat between two helmets. Without reading: three caps, the middle one different. With reading: the title explained by the objects. One image, one sentence.
6. Why exactly this way — a series about history without images of events; an object from the wardrobe is universal and needs no prior knowledge. The same recipe as Chase: find the single element without which it can't work, and add nothing.
7. What would kill it — a background (map of Europe, flags). The objects work because their ground is white like a display case.

Principles: nadjeni-predmet-kao-rijec jedna-slika-jedna-rijec serija-kao-identitet (Mobil Showcase / Masterpiece Theatre series — fixed format: white or flat ground, one photographed object, serif text, Mobil at bottom; the object varies) To verify against the image: exact helmet models (Brodie / M1) — likely from the screenshot.

1. What it is — poster for a week of telephone fundraising (23–26.2.1978, with radio station WQXR), offset, 87.6 × 61.2 cm; Chermayeff, Geismar, Blackburn.
2. Composition — cream sheet; four musical staves (five thin black lines each) across the full width; on the lines, instead of notes, photographed glass marbles in various colours, each with a small shadow — about 30 pieces, arranged like a melody (up and down, groups of two or three). At top two lines of handwriting, at bottom four lines of handwriting, the letters spaced as if they too were notes. Nothing else.
3. Colour — cream, black, and the spot colours of the marbles (blue, red, green, yellow, white). Colour is only on the object, evenly scattered — no hierarchy, as in a melody itself.
4. Typography — Chermayeff's handwriting, printed letters, spaced; not typeset.
5. Message — children's marbles on an orchestra's staves: "play", "voluntary contribution", and sound — glass on glass. At five metres: sheet music with colours; at half a metre: you see that they are marbles and read the date.
6. Why exactly this way — a fundraising campaign must not look expensive, so handwriting and a child's object instead of typesetting and a photograph of the orchestra. The staff is a grid (precise), everything on it is hand-drawn or found — gest-rukom-nasuprot-rezu in its purest form in this body of work.
7. What would kill it — setting the text in an actual font. The contrast between the machine lines and the hand is the only contrast in the piece.

Principles: nadjeni-predmet-kao-rijec gest-rukom-nasuprot-rezu analogija-umjesto-ilustracije To verify against the image: whether the marbles actually follow some melody (pitch by line) or are arranged freely.

1. What it is — poster for a series on PBS Channel 13 (Mobil sponsor), „A Drawing Room Intrigue", offset, 116,8 × 76,2 cm; Chermayeff, Geismar, Blackburn.
2. Composition — red field; right, across two-thirds of the height, a photograph of a black men's riding boot; entering it (or exiting from it) is a white cut-out silhouette of a woman's leg, knee bent, foot in the boot. Text top left, in a narrow column, white, left-aligned; Mobil bottom right, PBS mark left. Eye path: white leg (brightest) → boot → title.
3. Colour — three: red plane, black boot (photo, with sheen), white cut-out leg. White is also the text, so the leg and the title belong to the same „loud" plane.
4. Typography — serif, mixed case, small, left; classical. Mobil logotype.
5. Message — a woman's leg in a man's boot = „intrigue in the drawing room" in one object and one cut-out. From five metres: red, black, white leg. From half a metre: you read what day and channel. The wit is in the meeting of two registers: photography (boot) and paper (leg).
6. Why exactly this way — Austen without costumes and portraits: no actors to photograph before the US broadcast, so a found object + cut-out. Same recipe as 06, different ground.
7. What would kill it — the leg as a photograph. Then it's an ad for stockings.

Principles: nadjeni-predmet-kao-rijec ravna-boja-na-daljinu serija-kao-identitet jedna-slika-jedna-rijec To verify against the image: whether the leg is a paper cut-out or a flat white printed field.