Brand Bible

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BRAND BIBLE286

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I like problem solving. That is at the core of what

I do and what I’m interested in visually. Branding

and corporate identity projects consolidate all the

attributes you associate with a company’s products

or services into a visual form. Distilling those traits

into a mark is a challenge, because the design can

only express so many things. My approach is to nd

the simplest means to express the big idea and depict

the company not necessarily as it is at that moment,

but in terms of what it aspires to be.

31

How to Brand

a corporation



Ste Geissbuhler

C&G Partners

Vocabularies of

design, symbolism, and

what makes a

memorable brand

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Can you give me an example? For instance,

how did you approach the redesign of NBC’s

corporate identity when you did that in the

early ’80s?

NBC originally used a peacock made out of colorful

paintbrushes as a device to indicate that a program

was going to be in “living color,” back in the era when

color TV was a new and exciting phenomenon. The

peacock image was not originally the network’s

corporate identity.

Before we were called in, NBC had gone through all

sorts of logos. The “snake” consisted of the network’s

letters linked together in one connected line. Another

was the letter N rendered in a patriotic blue and red

that was very abstracted and looked “hard.” That

design didn’t seem the right tone for NBC, which is

far more entertaining than that mark would suggest.

The letter N didn’t mean anything, and there was no

reason to abbreviate a three-letter abbreviation like

CBS and ABC, even though people no longer know

what the letters stand for. We felt that the peacock,

which the network had used in the past, was actually

a very appropriate symbol. It’s a proud bird showing

o its feathers, and it’s associated with color. People

could relate to that. We redesigned the peacock,

simplied it, and then assigned the colors based on

the color bars the technicians use to calibrate the

broadcast equipment.

The identity you created for Merck is both a

brand mark and a word mark. What are the

challenges in this type of project?

There are many. Merck is one of the oldest pharma-

ceutical and chemical companies in the world. We

created a symbol for the company that was made out

of simple, geometric forms that are obviously related

to tablets, pills, capsule shapes, petri dishes, and

other objects associated with medicine. In the white

space, you can even see a mortar and pestle shape, an

ancient symbol related to drugs and medicine. With

the symbol we created, the simplest geometric forms

communicate what is necessary. At the same time,

the aqua color associated with hospital scrubs made

sense. Previously, every division of Merck had its own

individual symbols and logos. We created a graphic

nomenclature system to allow Merck to be consist-

ently communicated as the overarching brand and

parent company while still allowing the company’s

many divisions to be represented within that system.

Even in Europe, where the company name is MSD,

the symbol and type tie it back to the parent corpora-

tion’s brand. We wanted to consolidate it and make it

all one aesthetic.

What trends do you see in branding today?

There’s an unbelievably competitive situation at the

moment. Not just between design rms, but between

brands. Everybody wants to have a very memorable

brand that people recall instantly and associate

with the right attributes and storyline. And it gets

more and more dicult to nd that—especially for

companies that don’t have tangible products that you

Logo for NBC

How to Brand a Corporation

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