Ivan Chermayeff 1932-2017
A tribute to the brilliant designer Ivan Chermayeff.

A tribute to the brilliant designer Ivan Chermayeff.
Chermayeff & Geismar designed a series of exhibition posters for the Howard Wise Gallery in the 1960s, highlighting the artists’ works. Wise exhibited abstract expressionists including Milton Resnick and Edward Dugmore, and later specialized in kinetic art and light sculputure.
These exhibition catalogs and announcements for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts were created just a year after the museum’s founding in 1956.
Masterpiece Theatre was the principal portal into British television for American audiences in the seventies; Mobil, the sponsor, drafted their longtime designers Chermayeff & Geismar to make posters for various features.
Ivan Chermayeff uses collage and collections to create texture and dimensionality, continually exploring modernist ideas about bringing process to the forefront.
Chermayeff and Geismar published a spiral-bound portfolio of their trademarks in 1979, a precursor to the 2000 volume TM, published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Chermayeff & Geismar for the State of Maine Cheese Company.
Icons of culture and folklore are interpreted by the artists of Push Pin.
Herb Lubalin was among the many designers and illustrators who contributed to the United States Information Agency’s 1962 graphic arts exhibition that toured the USSR.
The United States Information Agency deploys its secret weapon in the Cold War: designers and illustrators.
Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar’s expressive typography for The Composing Room.
Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar’s playful experiments with type placement and scale for Concert Associates.
Chermayeff & Geismar interpreted scientific data for Ciba Pharmaceuticals.
Love and Joy About Letters is a testament to Ben Shahn’s love affair with letters: the beauty of the letter forms, the liberating influence hand-lettering, and how the incorporation of letters added meaning to his art.
I was initially drawn to this book because it reminded me of the Chas Addams and Ed Arno collections from my dad’s bookshelf. There are stylistic similarities to the classic New Yorker cartoons, but Abner Dean’s work dispenses with their gloss to espouse a much bleaker reality.
Is it a top secret missile defense system? A world-wide clandestine computer network designed to topple rogue governments? The futuristic and vaguely ominous-sounding System 1 was actually an office furniture system from Dictaphone’s furniture division Marble/Imperial.
Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar designed this elaborate promo system for a Knoll modular filing system. Some details from the project follow.
Chermayeff & Geismar’s promotional work for General Fireproofing’s steel office furniture neatly represents how they adapted their dominant styles to suit the needs of their corporate clients.
The design firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar established their reputation for brilliant corporate identity work with one of their earliest clients, Pepsi-Cola.
Another recent addition from Ivan Chermayeff: the beautiful slipcased hardcover for The new graphic art, a trilingual history of the basis for the Swiss design style, compiled by Karl Gerstner and Markus Kutter in 1959.