Heraldry for the Industrial Age

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Corporate logos strive to be daring, modern and original

Much as medieval knights brandished their heraldic emblems, an increasing number of businesses are brandishing new trademarks. Like the old coats of arms, the new logos are designed to impress friend and foe, inspire vassals with loyalty and pride, and bolster the sense of power. America's best designers are brought to bear on this imagemaking, which generally covers corporate signs, advertising, printed matter and buildings.

Some of the increase in corporate heraldry is due to a trend toward corporate reorganizations, mergers and name changes. An example is the Sun Co., once known as the Sun Oil Co., a nearly century-old, publicity-shy Philadelphia family business. In the 1970s, the company decided to diversify and its image became hazy. In 1979, management asked the design firm Anspach Grossman Portugal (A.G.P.) to analyze the problem and give the new company a logo that would exude unity and strength.

The designers came up with a sunburst shining through the word SUN, the symbol that for almost a year has been appearing on oil drills and storage tanks, trucks and hard hats, check forms and stationery, as well as magazine and television advertising. Employees are beginning to display the sunburst on T shirts and tote bags, and SUN workers at a subsidiary in Dallas have sewed the logo on a flag that flies from their building.

A.G.P, which calls itself "a marketing communications and design consulting firm," has done similar image-lifting jobs for, among others, Citibank/Citicorp, Mitsubishi Bank, J. Walter Thompson and AMF leisure products. The firm's redesign of Texaco's graphics is not so much concerned with enhancing the company's image as attracting customers to shiny new stations where a range of goods and services is on sale. Texaco's familiar star is given new prominence by being displayed in white on a red circle against a black background. The company's black, white and red service stations have a clean, nononsense, Mies van der Rohe look. The only adornments are deadpan signs reminding customers to turn off their engines, check the oil and, with gas sales dropping because of fuel-efficient engines, urging them to get a car wash, snacks or cigarettes. To date, 94 new Texaco stations have been built and more than 200 will be rehabilitated with the new design. All have met or exceeded sales expectations even though, as A.G.P. Designer Eugene J. Grossman puts it, "Some folks think a friendly gas station ought to be a little messy."

The idea of a uniform corporate look originated in Germany before World War I. Its pioneer was AEG, the nationwide electric company, which began as a manufacturer of light bulbs, soon made electric appliances and, by 1928, controlled mines, railroads, rolling mills and airplane plants. Peter Behrens, a painter, graphic artist and architect, who also gained a reputation as a designer of type faces and industrial products, created AEG's distinct, although by now somewhat antiquated rendition of its initials.

Behrens' idea of wedding artistic form to machine production strongly influenced the Bauhaus school of design, which his former assistant Walter Gropius founded in 1919 at Weimar. In graphics as in industrial design and architecture, the Bauhaus stripped away historic associations and ornaments in a search for essences. Letter forms no longer followed the paths of the scribe's pen or engraver's burin, but were constructed with ruler and compasses. The new type faces, posters and symbols were not always easily legible. But they were blunt and provocative, the ideal style for mass communication, advertising and propaganda.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, who both taught at the Bauhaus, brought the new graphic style to U.S. advertising studios. Says Bayer, 82, who was consultant and director of design for the Container Corp. of America from 1946 to 1965: "I told my friend Walter P. Paepcke, then Container's president, that a modern corporation should project a socially and culturally responsible personality. It should be a tastemaker and thought provoker. It should contribute to civilization." The result was Container's famous 20-year advertising campaign featuring "Great Ideas of Western Man," with illustrations by such notable artists as Ben Shahn, Ernest Trova and James Gill.

The standard of excellence in corporate appearance was set by Camillo Olivetti and his son Adriano. The Olivettis started manufacturing typewriters and other office machines in 1908 at Ivrea, Italy. From the outset, their company was dedicated to outstanding design. Olivetti also excelled in providing such employee services as nurseries, day camps and housing assistance. Said Riccardo Musatti, Olivetti's director of advertising until his death in 1965: "The corporate image ... should not be a distorting mirror or a come-on symbol, but the total expression of a complex reality."

In 1955 the Olivetti style impressed Thomas Watson Jr., then president of IBM. This gave Eliot Noyes, design consultant for IBM products and buildings since 1946, his chance. "Olivetti suddenly became a first-rate example to point to," Noyes said, "a company in which a consistent design program was obviously an integral part of its management policies." With Watson's full support, Noyes and Paul Rand developed the IBM style. (Noyes and Rand also created the distinctive Westinghouse logo.)

Noyes, who died in 1977, also developed a logo for Mobil with Chermayeff & Geismar Associates. This firm also created the fetching, letterless, four-color octagonal trademark for the Chase Manhattan Bank, probably the first completely abstract logo, whose design, says Chase, is supposed to "convey a sense of dignity and the dynamic purpose of the bank." The versatile and famous CBS eye was developed by Bill Golden, art director at CBS for 19 years. Currently, the leading imagemakers are Lippincott & Margulies, who created the Xerox logo and claim authorship of more than 2,200 others, including Uniroyal, RCA and ChemBank.

The approaches of these designers vary as much as the ambitions and the nature of the companies they serve. Some designers go in for elaborate market studies and psychological testing. Says Walter Margulies: "Research is mandatory." On the other hand Rand says, "Surveys and research are a waste of time. When I designed the IBM logo, I just did it."

Whatever approach designers take, graphic business communication cannot afford to retreat into elitism as some architecture does. To be effective, it must be widely appealing and yet daringly modern and original. Surprisingly, it often succeeds. Big Business graphics probably is the only art form in our time that is both uncompromisingly modern and genuinely popular. Signs like Sun's sunburst are like a pretty smile on a noisy, crowded street. --By Wolf Von Eckardt

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.