DESIGNER AT CHERMAYEFF & GEISMAR
What determines the choice of colors when you design a corporate logo?
Well, most corporations tend to prefer blue to any other color. It doesn’t have any negative connotation. It evokes the sky, etc. Blue is safe.
Blue doesn’t have to be the color of the whole logo, of course. We designed MOBIL that has a red “O” in it, but it’s an accent within a blue logo. The same holds true for many others that are basically a blue scale with maybe a red accent.
Red is usually perceived, at least on the corporate level, perhaps as too aggressive. I don’t think that we have at this point to overcome the political stigma that red is communism. That used to be in the olden days, I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
There are many logos that are based on the red, white and blue scheme…
Yes, and I think we are particularly guilty of that! But you know, CHASE MANHATTAN BANK is blue, I.B.M. is also blue, those large conservative corporations tend to go in that direction.
We just did TIME WARNER, and we thought there was really a chance to break from that mold. Then we found out that TIME INC. had PMS 300 blue in its past and so did WARNER COMMUNICATION. But, even though these were the corporate colors, the perception of TIME LIFE is red. So we suggested that perhaps it was time to do something in purple because of TIME & WARNER melting together. It was perceived as an interesting notion but it was killed rather quickly. It was too flamboyant a color for somebody who has come out of the TIME tradition, even if it would have been more acceptable for the entertainment related WARNER people..
When you are commissioned to design a logo, how much freedom do you have to decide what the colors are going to be?
We always make recommendations, and try to be reasonable about it but a lot of our work has to do with mergers or companies upgrading what they had in the past. Often a corporation associates with a color and feels strongly about it, you can try to maybe swing away from this with a hue which may be more memorable or has more distinction to it, but often it is very much influenced by the past.
Color is never brought up as the original question. It always comes along with the symbol or the logotype.
When you get into the range of symbols even more so, it has to do with what the company is about. In NBC’s case, the revelation was that ABC was perceived as black and white, CBS did not have much color to it and NBC had this great advantage in having a symbol [the peacock] that stood for color. That peacock was a symbol for color television, it was not the symbol for NBC. They just adopted it as a pet. It used to say: “Brought to you in living color” and then the peacock came on the screen to announce that the program was changing from black and white to color. And then NBC adopted it because it has a great deal to do which what they’re about, which is color television.
In another case, if you do, let’s say, a symbol for Central Park, you have a good chance of making that green, simply because it implies a relief from all the city grey. It obviously has to do with what it’s about.
What are your limitations when reworking or updating a corporate logo?
Well if it is a reworking of something or a merging of an old company with another old company of course you try to see what their past has been, because you try to have some continuation. It’s often very helpful to tie in, especially if there is equity in the perception or equity in the visual heritage companies bring with them. You try to, at least, tie something over.
TIME WARNER is perhaps an extreme example, both companies’ identities were given up in order to attain a new one. It was the only way to do so because both had a very strong product identification. For TIME, nobody knows really what TIME INC. looks like, but they know the product, they know what TIME magazine looks like, and LIFE, PEOPLE magazine, FORTUNE, TIME LIFE books and what have you. For WARNER the “W” in a sort of TV shape was not quite as well known as for instance the WARNER BROS. shield, which was a division of WARNER COMMUNICATION, so the corporate heritage was not that strong. Nevertheless, even though it’s a completely new symbol, that signifies an eye and an ear, in the end it goes back to blue because that is what they are used to, both of them.
Do you use marketing studies such as the ones that determined for example that the color orange stimulates the appetite and that, therefore all fastfood restaurants should use orange or orange related color schemes for their logos?
No, no. We find it totally useless in a way.
In general we regard marketing research as sort of useless when it comes to identities. It has a reason for being when you are testing the past perception of something, or behavior patterns, or what have you. But when you are introducing a new image the old data doesn’t really help you. In fact it’s often the opposite of what you expect. I’m not generalizing, this is the way we think about it. We think we are fairly normal people and we have a sense of how things are perceived, we have our own reactions that are pretty straight forward and right on in most cases. So we rely more on instinct than data which sort of document high percentages of people that react to blue or to red. I have gone myself though endless situations where the marketing research was totally wrong. Way back, I was working for a different company, we were asked to design packaging for a brand of frozen food. Every study indicated that what you had to emphasize was freshness and whiteness, coldness and all that, but we came around and did a package that had steaming hot food on a black background and it stood out so well that people immediately went for it. It was simply changing the perception of what it looks like in the freezer cabinet to what it actually is all about, which is hot food. You don’t care where it’s coming from, it’s more like what is appetizing in the end.
Same thing with cereals. Because, in the past, Kellog had always had white packages with food on it, photographed on full color, some European company came out with dark packaging with wood and grain and warm natural colors. It when over very well. It all of the sudden became sort of an indication for wholesomeness and tradition and good materials.
Would you say that if a certain color pattern has been used before, it’s a good enough reason not to use it again?
Well probably so… No I guess more of what I’m saying is, that kind of marketing research is quite useless in this situation. It really, like most marketing research, is based on historical data, in other words what people have in the past perceived to be true. If confronted with something new, you can’t really gage the reaction.
For instance, when we did the NBC logo, to stay with that, there was a research firm which went out with the new symbol, without the name underneath, just the new abstracted bird, with the six feathers, the CBS eye, and maybe something like the CHASE MANHATTAN BANK symbol and so on, and they asked people to identify what they were. Now, nobody had seen that new NBC symbol at that time and yet it was I think close to 70% who identified it as television first of all and most of them correctly also identified NBC. That was much more than anybody ever expected because there was such a retention of the image. Years before NBC had an abstract “N”, then it was sort of a combination of a very complicated bird with the “N” that they used for 5 or 6 years, so there wasn’t much of a precedent for understanding the new design and yet it was completely understandable to the people. So what I’m saying is that in most cases you can’t really predict what the reaction is to something before somebody has lived with it and accepted it as such.
Now, in the case of a new company that comes to you for a logo, how do you approach the question of color?
Well again, it depends if there is any “symbology” involved that brings with it a color association, or if it is a straight forward word, it’s completely abstract and you don’t have any association, even the word doesn’t carry any color association with it. Then you would try to use a color that again symbolizes the business, or the region, say… to make it very simple, it’s a pizza parlor and it serves fantastic original pizza. You might want to bring in the red white and green of the Italian flag. If it’s a furniture company and they do whole wood furniture you might want to use that kind of ingredient to make it a little bit clearer as to what kind of furniture they carry.
This seems very important because in the identification of a logo the perception of the color precedes the perception of the words…
Definitely. Take UPS, its a very dark and distinct brown which nobody else has. I think that the color by itself, even if you don’t see the symbol on the truck, is sufficient to recognize the company today. That’s as good an example as I can imagine, when the color has taken that significance. You know, you don’t recognize red as either Malboro or Coca Cola or anything else that is also red. You need the help of a form. In Malboro’s case it would be the roof, with Coke the wave. The combination of the two elements would trigger that. Its rare that the color alone does it.
In the case of Kodak, the yellow is actually registered as a trademark…
That’s right, and there again, that color has become such a significant distinction that it’s used in the vocabulary, the vernacular of people. You say “kind of a Kodak yellow” and everybody immediately knows what kind of deep ocre, orangy yellow you’re talking about.

Now to override everything that I just said there are some completely other functional points of view which one should consider when you do a color scheme. Let’s say somebody is a lemonade manufacturer and you think that yellow would be the right thing. But yellow doesn’t reproduce well, because most of our papers are white so yellow doesn’t read too well against the background, you can’t xerox it, it doesn’t fax at all. So I’m bringing a whole other point of view which has nothing to do with anything but function, the way it really performs. That’s why any identity we do, we of course have to consider in black and white because it has to fax, it has to be able to be printed in newspapers, so it has to perform well in black and white before anything else, and color is more of an additional luxury for applications where color is possible.
Still, I suppose the first reason for using bright colors is visual impact…
Yes. Well that’s why red is very popular because it’s probably the strongest signal color there is. It’s always sort of opposite any kind of natural color. You know a really bright red you don’t find in nature and specially not in an urban city so it will always stick out. That’s why stop signs are red, and traffic lights too. It is something you have a very strong reaction to; it’s a signal by itself.
The reason why many of the logotypes and symbols are in primary colors is because the fine shades between these colors are not really memorable. If something is slightly darkish red but its not burgundy, its not bright red, how do you describe it? It doesn’t have a distinction. You couldn’t call it a UPS brown.
That’s the case of Federal Express, that is recognized has being red white and blues, when it isn’t. It’s almost purple and dark orange but I’m not sure that in the eyes of the public those nuances are perceptible.
No, you can probably see it when you hold it next to something else, but you don’t remember it as a color because you can’t describe it very well. There are so many different blues out these but you hardly ever have a distinction, a specific blue attached to a specific corporation, even though they are probably watching over it and being very careful that they’re always using the same hue, in the perception it doesn’t make any difference.
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