After a few years of designing record albums, company magazines and packaging lines, the watershed moment came in 1960 when David Rockefeller asked Chermayeff and Geismar to create a new logo for Chase Bank, then the second largest bank in America. Eschewing a figurative design as was historically customary, instead the designers drew an abstract, symbolic shape, both simple and memorable, which is still in use today. “You may not be able to draw it”, as Chermayeff has said, “but when you see it, you know you’ve seen it before.”

The company went on to design a plethora of emblematic visual identities for corporate, retail, media, institutional and public entities such as Merck Pharmaceuticals, Hearst, Armani Exchange, Barneys New York, Showtime, PBS, MOCA, MOMA, the Smithsonian Institute, Library of Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency, all of which have become an integral part of American culture. Their logos may seem simple, but as Geismar claims, they are the product of a painstaking “process of investigation, creativity and politics" whereby you try, according to Chermayeff, “to understand what your clients are, which is not necessarily what they say they are”.

Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv has also been a prolific designer of posters, be they for museum exhibitions, television shows or other cultural events, but the company has also created large scale installations such as the murals for the Lisbon Aquarium and the iconic steel sculpture of a massive red 9 on West 57th Street in New York.

Apart from a brilliant graphic designer and illustrator, Chermayeff, who recently passed away on December 2nd, 2017 at the age of 85, was also a creative collage artist whose work has been widely exhibited in America, Europe and Japan. Made out of mailing envelopes, scraps of packaging, ticket stubs and other found materials that are assembled into whimsical faces and abstractions, his collages feature a colourful, modernist aesthetic that attest to his unerring sense of colour, form and visual connections as well as his innate wit.

In his memoirs, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that “perfection [in design] is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away” and nowhere is this more pertinent than when designing a logo, as Chermayeff & Geismar have been demonstrating with imagination, astuteness and humour throughout their six decades of design excellence.