An Interview with Steff Geissbühler, Designer of the NBC Logo

Ian Paget: I've been reading through loads of interviews with you and I actually found out that really early on in your career, and this would've been after you did your studies and after you had your first job, which was in a pharmaceutical company, really early on in your career, and if I worked out right you would've been in your late 20s, you actually taught as an Associate Professor at Philadelphia College of Art. How did you manage to get such a huge opportunity when you were so young?

Steff Geissbuhler: Oh. First of all, I was 25, so it was-

Ian Paget: Yeah. Very young.

Steff Geissbuhler: That's pretty young, yes. It is certainly young for teaching. In fact, Paul Rand once said in the early days, "You have no business teaching at your age."

Ian Paget: He actually said that to you?

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes.

Ian Paget: Wow.

Steff Geissbuhler: I mean, how did I get there? Simple enough. I was working at Geigy at the time and my former schoolmate, Ken Hebert, came to Switzerland to ask me... I graduated with him a couple of years before, four years before, and he came and asked me whether I would consider coming over and helping teach because he had just been elected from Carnegie Mellon to teach at Philadelphia College of Art and take over the chairmanship or the head of the department position and-

Ian Paget: So he would've been young as well. I guess, he was 25 as well?

Steff Geissbuhler: No. He was 10 years older than me. In fact, everybody in my class was pretty much 10 years older than me so I got very early into graphic design and stayed there forever. So he asked me whether I would come over to the States and I was just... three and a half years or whatever at Geigy and I had a fabulous life.

Everything worked well, I did good work apparently and it got some awards and all kinds of stuff very early on. And so I said, "So, why not?" The United States was always alluring in a way. I put stuff in storage and all that and I had just married and had my first kid. So he was only two months old, in fact, when we came to Philadelphia. So it was a lot of things coming together at an early age, as you can tell.

Ian Paget: Yeah, that would've been a very busy time. I've got a little one myself, she's just over one year old, so I can imagine that was tough at that time.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes. Yeah. We just about packed a couple of diapers and an apple.

Ian Paget: So, I understand you were teaching at that time and I read that you was also doing freelance graphic design work for a number of different companies.

Steff Geissbuhler: That's right.

Ian Paget: How was you juggling all of that at that time? That seems like an awful lot to do, especially if you had a two month old baby as well.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yeah, right. Well I was energetic and really involved and wanted to practice... I didn't want to just teach. I'm certainly not an academic. I managed, it was not overwhelming amount of work. I was just doing whatever I could in those years, and I had, upstairs in the attic, I had my studio and I did a lot of hands on work. I mean, obviously this was way before computers.

So, yeah, and then I worked for Murphy Levy Wurman, this is Richard Saul Wurman, the guy who started TED conference and TED Talk and all those things. And he had an architecture office together with Allen Murphy and it was 'Murphy Levy Wurman', was what it was called, the architecture office. And he asked me to help him with some graphic design stuff in the architecture office so that's where I freelanced and we did some booklets together for MIT and books on urban planning and all kinds of things he was involved in. And I illustrated everything and also started to write a little and so on.

I always had an affinity, or not just an affinity, but I really liked architecture as an art from as well as a profession. My father learned to be an architect before he became the calling to be a Methodist minister, and my grandfather was an architect on mother's side. And so architecture was always sort of in my blood and I guess I like the whole area of thinking in terms of space and that sort of thing.

So anyways that was one freelance job and I was with Murphy Levy Wurman, for I would say three years at least, if not more. At the same time I also started to freelance for George Nelson in New York, but he gave me little projects and I commuted back and forth from Philadelphia to New York to show him stuff. That didn't last that long but he was working on Barney's New York at the time, strangely enough a logo I was very involved with later on. And I did some promotion for that and so on.

But anyway, other than that I had some other little freelance thingies going on but those were the more important ones.

Ian Paget: Yeah, absolutely. And then I understand, if I got this right, in about 1973 you then spent a year designing corporate identity systems at ADP (Anspach Grossman Portugal)?

Steff Geissbuhler: That's right.

Ian Paget: I read that you had this office with a big tree in it and-

Steff Geissbuhler: Ficus tree, yes.

Ian Paget: And you mentioned in this particular interview that I read that what you would do is you would come out and across the road you could see in the windows and that was another design firm that listeners will be aware of, which would have been Chermayeff and Geismar.

Steff Geissbuhler: Exactly.

Ian Paget: Can you tell us more about that time? Because that's how I originally found out about you, as I said prior to hitting the record button I was reading the book Identity. I'm a huge fan of Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv and that's how I came across you. So I'd love to hear about that time, how you used to come out and look across the road.

Steff Geissbuhler: By the way just to insert this, there is a book called Designing, which unfortunately is no longer available. But it's a big fat book which has the whole timeline in it, Ivan Chermayeff.

Tom Geismar, and myself are the authors. And it's the whole timeline from like 1957 when Brownjohn hired Chermayeff and Geismar and it became Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar.

Brownjohn you may be familiar with, he's a British guy, Robert Brownjohn. He hired the two of them and started in '57 and then he had a drug problem and actually then did the early James Bond openers, that was Robert Brownjohn. And went back to England because he could get his opioids there better, and unfortunately he died soon thereafter and then Chermayeff and Geismar continued in 1960 as Chermayeff and Geismar. And I came to it in '75 and was hired. I mean they called me up and said, "Would you come and talk to us" and all that and they knew that I was at Anspach, Grossman, Portugal and-

Ian Paget: So at that time- Sorry to interrupt, was you already friends with them? Did they already know you in person?

Steff Geissbuhler: No. No, I knew of them, of course. I knew very much of them and they knew that I had been teaching in Philadelphia but we really haven't had any connection otherwise.

Ian Paget: So how did they come across you? Was it just because of the teaching and your name had become familiar in the area?

Steff Geissbuhler: I couldn't tell you. It was interesting because I think they were looking for people and I guess my name came up as somebody who just came to New York a year before and they were interested in having me. So I couldn't tell you what inspired them in the first place but I guess... I didn't have a name yet, I mean I was coming from Philadelphia so I did good work at HEP for one year and that was it. I did a lot of work, but I don't know whether that influenced anything.

Ian Paget: So they called you up and I guess you went in for an interview, and like I said, if you had been looking across the street or you'd been curious what Tom and Ivan had been doing I guess you must have been pretty excited for the opportunity.

Steff Geissbuhler: Oh, no kidding. I mean I was instantly. I know I took a pay cut but that had no influence on me. I really wanted to work for those two guys because when I went to school in Switzerland I knew about Fletcher, Forbes, Crosby and Gill, which of course then became Pentagram. I was familiar with Wim Crouwel and Amsterdam, Total Design, and I was familiar with Chermayeff and Geismar as being the sort of major firms I admired and all that. So obviously I was prepared and wanted to work for these guys, or with these guys I should say.

Ian Paget: Was there many graphic designers at that time? Because I mean this is all pre-computers. Now the situation is different, there are hundreds of thousands of people that can do graphic design because it's much more accessible.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes.

Ian Paget: Was there very few people that had your skills at that time?

Steff Geissbuhler: I guess less so, yeah I'm sure. But there were a lot of designers in New York, Rudy de Harak and Lou Dorfsman and Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast and all these people which are still alive and kicking. So that was the environment I was in and Massimo Vignelli of course, and all these guys where there and I was not yet a part of the international organisation, the Alliance Graphique Internationale, at that point but soon there after, Tom and Ivan suggested that I be a member.

Ian Paget: So when you did join the company, was it just Tom and Ivan?

Steff Geissbuhler: Yeah. It was Tom and Ivan and John Grady who was an architect. He did the architecture part, and exhibit kind of part. Yeah, it was mainly Ivan and Tom and some employees. We did have some employees but they made me sort of an associate right away. And then, whatever it was, three years later I became a partner. But there were other people there. People, employees, some in architecture and some, of course, in graphic design and I hired quite a few there but always with the consent of Ivan and Tom.

Ian Paget: I'd love to spend quite a bit of time going into your logo design process because this is a podcast about logo design but there's a couple of really major projects that you've worked on that are quite famous now, I don't know if they was at the time, but like the NBC peacock logo. That's one of yours that I'm most familiar with. I think it might have been that piece in that book I mentioned that might have had your name next to it and that's how I originally came across you.

So would you mind talking through how would you approach a project like that and I'd love to go into the nitty gritty details if possible because we've got plenty of time to talk through this. So how would you approach that?

Steff Geissbuhler: There was a whole article about it way way back, I forget what the magazine was, maybe PRINT or something like that, about how we went about it because it was an internal competition in a way because we all, Ivan, Tom, and I worked on developing an identity and a logo and I gravitated more to the idea of something we all know, like birds and peacocks and things like that, and Tom was much more into well maybe the lettering, to do something with NBC perhaps, like Paul Rand did the ABC so-

Ian Paget: So just for clarification, was there already some kind of peacock reference at that time? I've seen the evolution and I know that there was a previous version that was a peacock but had a lot more colours to it. You simplified that down, is that correct?

Steff Geissbuhler: Well, let me just straighten you out on that because there was an earlier peacock and it was simply... I think Herb Lubalin was involved even, I'm not quite sure about that, but it was not a logo for NBC, it was more a device by which they changed from black and white to colour. It would tell us "The next program is brought to you in living colours" and it would go burr, and-

Ian Paget: Oh wow, so it wasn't used as a logo it was just something used in a marketing campaign?

Steff Geissbuhler: No. Exactly. Later on... lots of people thought that it was the logo but it was not. The logo was actually the snake, which was the one line NBC with the C underneath the NB.

Ian Paget: Okay, so some of the information online is actually incorrect because I've seen these evolution... step by step of how they progressed. I might be wrong. I might be recalling it incorrectly but as far as I remember, I believe that there are some articles that share an earlier version of that peacock and I assumed that was their logo but thank you for clearing that up.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yeah. No, it wasn't. In fact, before we got into it, it was Lippincott & Margulies design firm did an N logo and it was like a square sliced diagonally in half which made the N and there was a blue part and a red part, I don't know, I can draw it for you in the air.

Ian Paget: I can put an image in the show notes if I can find it (see NBC logo evolution here).

Steff Geissbuhler: I'm sure it's in the whole development in there, so many places it has been misinterpreted and skipped, I mean before that, there was microphones with NBC underneath and all kinds of other symbols. Anyway, that device when they arrived at the N by Lippincott & Margulies, Nebraska television had the exact same logo done by a student but NBC was already implementing and they said, "We give you equipment, we give you cameras, we give you money and whatever" to Nebraska and you go and get another logo because we want to really play this one through.

And so Nebraska buckled down and got something else but the interesting thing was of course, they had paid like $100 to a student who came up with the same logo as L&M, Lippincott & Margulies, who at that point must have charged $100,000 easy, right? So it was quite a thing. But as soon as NBC owned the mark, they said we really don't like it. It's sharp, it looks like scalpels. We are an entertainment company. We are much softer and friendlier than that.

And they started to do something in house which was a disaster because they took the old peacock and put it over the N and so it was a linear... the N was sort of a linear coat hanger coming out of the peacock and it was very complex and confusing and people couldn't figure it out. That's when they came to us. And said can we do something about it. I immediately jumped on the idea of bringing the peacock because all my logos are illustrative in one way or another rather than abstract because I really believe in communicating with something which people already know. Something, which they can relate to.

Tom Geismar had done the Chase logo, Chase Manhattan bank, Mobil and all those kinds of things so I came out of that environment or my partners did so I really felt like I was much closer to illustration in a way than they were. I mean I shouldn't say that about Ivan, Ivan was always doing collages and art and the fine art sense.

So anyway, when we got the job, I really focused in on the idea of the peacock, wanted to refine it, wanted to simplify it, thought it was an excellent excellent symbol. It's a show bird. It's colourful. Speaking of the idea of converting black and white to colour at that point, of course, it was mainly colour. So that's what got me there. And I simply reduced the amount of feathers, I took advantage of the shape of the feathers to invert it in the middle to make the body of the peacock and then actually added the beak which goes into one of the feathers.

Ian Paget: It's the perfect logo.

Steff Geissbuhler: Thank you.

Ian Paget: It's one of my favourites. You can see it's stood the test of time. It still looks modern today. It goes to show that when you simplify things down like that it just works so well. I'd love to ask about, you mentioned you have this internal competition, where it sounds like all of you were working on the same project. What were some of the other ideas that was coming up at that time?

Steff Geissbuhler: Well like I said, obviously the lettering, NBC, which by the way we also created the new alphabet, it's called the NBC Futura, which is based on Futura typeface but it was modified in order to be more pointy and more interesting as a logo for, especially for the letters NBC.

Ian Paget: I want to ask you as well, something that you said about using illustration within the logo to reference something that people know already. Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by that because I know within Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv, I know that Tom's done a lot of very abstract kind of forms so it is quite a contrasting look or identity so would you mind expanding how you see logo design in terms of referencing things you know already?

Steff Geissbuhler: Let me go back quickly to Richard Saul Wurman which I think he called it, actually Louis Kahn. He was saying you understand something only relative to something you already understand and that actually is sort of a basis of what I'm talking about. I always felt that a symbol, it shouldn't tell a story, but it should relate to something you already know. In other words, something you equate with quality or colour or whatever it is so that you don't start completely from nowhere.

Now just in defence of Tom Geismar's, for instance, which doesn't need any defence, but to make a symbol for a bank is much different than a television company. A bank can only... you can only really talk about security and trust and those kinds of words which only in an abstract way can you actually personify that or make it legible to people.

So, I've done a lot of logos which include words because it was the best way to say it or the closest way to make a logo was to actually spell it out but in this case, it really needed a symbol which was very simple, could be applied to anything from a microphone to a camera to animation especially to any kind of reproduction technique. I mean the standards manual which I did for NBC, I should say we did, because I did it with quite a few employees together, shows all the divided pages were done in different printing techniques, like engraving, silk screening, photography, photo stamping and blind embossing and all that.

So all the divider pages in the manual which is a beautiful big book already alluded to the fact that you can really use this symbol in many many different ways, with or without colour, in the smallest simplest way, in the biggest facade kind of thing and signage and all that. So that was really my goal and it's always been a goal in logo design is to keep it very simple and make it useful and usable and also at the same time sort of more or less personify a company or an institute.

Ian Paget: So in terms of a simplicity and logo design, here today, there's loads of books and there's loads of resources. There's videos, there's loads of stuff on the internet, books that you can buy and so on. At that time that approach to simplicity was that a standard thing that people would aim for to be simple or was that quite new at that time?

Steff Geissbuhler: It was quite new. We... like I said there were you know other television companies around, especially those three which at the time existed, CBS, ABC, and NBC. And CBS had that wonderful eye you know as a symbol and that was much revered also. It happened more or less at the same time maybe... no, it happened before the NBC peacock but anyway so some of these logos became very famous because of their simplicity and because there were some big clients which you saw it much more often, it became more obvious so even the Chase Manhattan logo was done in 1960 and the peacock I designed in '79 it didn't get on the air until 1986.

So yeah, it was a movement. It really was. Simplicity became more and more important, simplicity in typography for instance. Obviously I grew up with Helvetica, Helvetica means Switzerland in Latin, Helvetia, so that was very much part of my upbringing, that simplicity of typography universe. Adrian Frutiger in Paris who is a Swiss but worked in Paris started Universe which was the only typeface we used that Geigy for instance. It was very San serif, very clean, very crisp, had a lot of variations to it in terms of slants and weight and condensing and all that.

Ian Paget: So those very simple ideas, when it came around to sharing news with the client, presenting them to the client, I assume that what you would have been presenting would have been quite new in terms of what they saw. Is there any interesting stories that you could share when it comes around to presenting that work and how the client reacted to it?

Steff Geissbuhler: I mean everything comes with reason and examples of why things in the past have been, not in the past but why logos are more acceptable if they're simpler and obviously we always showed whenever we presented the logo, we presented it immediately applied to all kinds of things, including business cards and letterhead and a sign perhaps and on a vehicle. You never show a logo naked. That doesn't make any sense. You have to immediately show the client how it's going to be used, what it's gonna look like and all that. There's a very famous thing about Saul Bass and his logo for Bell telephone and all that but anyway-

Ian Paget: In terms of that Bell logo, on YouTube for listeners that haven't seen this there is actually a video that's Saul Bass put together to present that logo and that video is fantastic. I mean that must have cost an absolute fortune to put together at that time but even though it's... I don't know when that's from but it could be like 60 years old or more, but you can learn so much from that video alone it's fascinating to watch.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yeah. Bass was also a filmmaker so he did it himself.

Ian Paget: Yeah, so he had the benefit of those skills.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yep. Also a very good friend. Unfortunately does no longer live but I was always very friendly with him so-

Ian Paget: So you knew him and Paul Rand and-

Steff Geissbuhler: Of course.

Ian Paget: Wow, amazing.

Steff Geissbuhler: I grew up with these people.

Ian Paget: Was there any lessons that you learned from them or is it just simply because you were all collectively learning from the same sources?

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes and we also were on the same page somehow. We all believed pretty much in the same idea of simplicity and communication in the simplest, straightforwardest way to take decoration out of the equation. It was not... it had to make sense rather than just look good. That I think and I'm saying of course that a logo should also look good literally, not to take that away but that's the last thing. If it performs, if it works, if it makes sense, that all comes first. It really has to be manageable and really rally people behind it, to support it. I mean there's a famous thing and sorry to sort of give you a little history lesson...

Ian Paget: No, this is fine, this is all good. Keep going.

Steff Geissbuhler: There's a famous situation where Paul Rand did this beautiful logo for Enron, you must have heard about that?

Ian Paget: Yes.

Steff Geissbuhler: It was an excellent excellent mark, beautiful logo, but then Enron behaved very badly and really did a lot of things on the very corrupt, under the table and what have you and before you knew it, this symbol stood for corporate corruption rather than for Enron the beautiful company. So you can see how a logo actually absorbs the behaviour or what people associate with the company, the quality, the honesty, all that. The logo absorbs all that and then the people make it what it becomes.

Ian Paget: Yes, it's fascinating and I don't know who coined the term, I've heard Michael Bierut say this but a logo is an empty vessel and it can absorb all of those meanings. So the Enron example is that one of the first that kind of absorbed all of the negativity with it?

Steff Geissbuhler: Well, no, there were many more but because it was big and people knew it and it was done by a very famous designer that's why I use it as an example because nobody had anything bad to say about the logo but then again we are all understood at that point that a logo does not make a company. It is the other way around. I mean the company and the quality and the product they produce is equated with the logo. So anyways, all we can do is reflect that as much as possible. But of course Paul Rand did not know that they were going off the deep end there, Enron, when he designed it.

Ian Paget: You guys kind of pioneered modern day logo design because everything that you mentioned about the simplicity and a lot of the rules that are in... I mean that there are no rules really, but a lot of the principles that are in the modern day books is all from that same generation or from the same group of people. It's the group of people that I look up to and learn from and it's amazing to think that that group of people that you knew were all the people that were kind of paving the way for how things would be from there on.

Steff Geissbuhler: Right. Well, you have to also understand that Tom and Ivan had Paul Rand as a teacher.

Ian Paget: Wow. I wasn't aware of that.

Steff Geissbuhler: Oh yeah, absolutely. Rand was teaching at Yale and Tom came from Brown University and Ivan was already at Yale. They got to know each other there. They had other people, like Herbert Matter, and all kinds of really good teachers there at the time.

Ian Paget: So you was at Chermayeff and Geismar for 30 years which is a long time. I'm 36 so it's the pretty much... it would be the equivalent of almost my entire life so it's a long time, were there any other interesting projects or things that came up that you would be interested in talking about from that time?

Steff Geissbuhler: Well while we're on logos obviously the Time Warner thing was a major thing for me because it was sort of the epitome of abstracting an eye and an ear in a way because... it also was again it was a competition within the company. We all worked on different things. Tom was working on TWs and Ivan was thinking in other terms. So we all compared notes and looked at each other sketches and had pinups and all that and somehow my eye and ear surfaced as being the most unique or the most appropriate at the same time as a logo and so as we always did whenever the best thing surfaced, we put our combined efforts behind it to make it work and show it as our best version.

But we did show other versions, we did show TWs and things like that but then the client really understood it at the time, the CEO really understood what we meant by that of merging Time Inc which is a journalistic company with Warner Communications which was all about movies and videos and things like that so in my mind the combination of these two companies, which actually didn't have much in common otherwise, was to find something which they both had in common and both their products were seen and heard, like newspapers and movies and all that, which was sort of the combination of what I was looking for and that's how the eye and ear somehow came about. I tried to combine that, something which hadn't been done before and make it at the same time sort of a spiral going into the centre and all that.

Ian Paget: Yes, it's another incredible logo. It's one of my favourites from you again. So you mentioned that you came up with the idea and you mentioned that everyone got on board to come to the best solution. How did that work? Was it just a case of everybody drawing different variants of it and sharing them? How long did you spend on that because I want to kind of put stress on this because I sketch in a sketchbook, sometimes I come up with an idea and then I do lots of different variants of it, so I'd love to hear how you guys were approaching that?

Steff Geissbuhler: Oh, same way. Sketching and doodling on the back of envelopes as we all used to say and everywhere else. Nobody had beautiful sketchbooks like Michael Beirut keeps a library of. But anyway, we sketched everywhere we could and like I said, we used to have pinups where we pinned up our latest versions and stuff and then we narrow it down and say, "Well, this one really looks like it could be something," and of course I tried endless variations of weight and thickness and this was exactly at the time when computers were already integrated in our office and we tried like hell to do the spiral with the curves and with the levers and all that on the computer and we just did not succeed.

There were some people who really were good at it and they just did not succeed so I finally just made a photostat of it, took it home, and painted over it. I literally did it by hand and then we scanned that in and that then became the logo. So there's another example of... nowadays I could do this by computer but the hand... the whole thing was not the mathematical situation it's more emotional than anything else and so that led me to actually do it by hand. It just seemed to be the right way to go.

Ian Paget: It's great to think that this collaboration where the logos are being sketched on paper and then pinned up. I know that Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv still do this exact same thing and put the work up so that everybody can see it and narrow it down and I think Moving Brands do something similar. I was lucky enough to get a tour of their studio of a number of years back and they have these big boards so that they can put things up and take them down because apparently they sometimes have clients coming in and they've got stuff under NDA so they have to take it down. That's how they do it and I love that's-

Steff Geissbuhler: We switched to the boards later on because with multiple clients you don't want to keep it up-

Ian Paget: Yeah. Lot's going on.

Steff Geissbuhler: ...and other things had to be pinned up. There is actually a video of CBS Sunday Morning thing which I arranged or they asked me whether I would talk about logo design and we did at C&G partners, I don't know whether you ever saw that.

Ian Paget: I haven't seen that. Is that on YouTube or is that anywhere online?

Steff Geissbuhler: I don't know if it's on YouTube but I can certainly send it to you.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I'd absolutely love to see that, definitely, and what I can do is I can put it in the show notes for this episode so anyone listening can also watch that but yeah I'd absolutely love to see that, thank you.

Steff Geissbuhler: It was the CBS Sunday morning thing which is a routine, the different episodes and this happened to be the Sunday Morning thing on money and they were saying you know why don't you do a logo on CBS Sunday Morning issue and that's what we did. I'm promising something which I'm not sure I have, other than on this.

Ian Paget: If you have it great, if you don't, don't stress over it. Don't worry but I would love to see that and I'm sure people listening-

Steff Geissbuhler: In a very simple way it shows also that we came up with three solutions and then they asked the viewership of that TV thing to vote on it and it turned out that they all voted for mine because mine was probably the most clearest and most understandable.

CBS Sunday Morning has a sun for a logo and in fact they showed very different suns every Sunday morning but I simply replaced the word money, the 'o' with the sun so it was a very very straightforward thing rather than dollar signs and things like that, the other things which we came up with. That was an example of the most simple and I could have... I knew exactly what the people would vote for because it was something they would understand, something they equated with the two things, money and that Sunday morning show so anyway.

Ian Paget: Okay so I want to go back to 2005 and this is when the founding partners of Chermayeff and Geismar split off to form a small creative studio and you along with the other partners became C&G Partners.

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes.

Ian Paget: What was the reason why they made that change and what did it mean to become partner like that was she still involved in some way or with you more from an outside-

Steff Geissbuhler: No, it was a simple thing. I think we had grown to almost 40 people or 35 or something like that as a company and Ivan and Tom decided that they didn't really want to get bigger and they wanted in fact to reduce and just be the two of them again and more or less go back to the beginning, just the two of them with maybe an assistant each and that was the reason they did that and I was sort of a left holding the bag with 22 people and the others were not partners, Jon Alger, Keith Helmetag, and Emma Frigerio were not partners yet, they were associates.

So when I had to make a decision either to go on my own or just get lost or whatever, I talked to them and I said look if we make a new partnership and I invited them to become partners, let's start a new company but in order for people to remember us, I think we should not come up with a whole new name we should actually... people knew us C&G or Steff from C&G or Keith from C&G that kind of thing so we said why not make it C&G partners because that's what we all were... I was the only partner but nevertheless we were all part of a C&G and so I was a little afraid to just start a whole new thing with the new name and new place in all that.

It was a little bit of a frantic situation there of trying to form a new company and literally we moved with 22 people who all demanded of course a salary and a new place and a friend of mine, James Sebastian, had just evacuated a design office and it was on the market in fact when we talked to each other on the phone. It was another one of those crazy situations where he had just closed his office and wanted to move on and I talked to him and he said, "So what's going on over there" and I said "Well, you know looks like I'm going to be looking for a place" and he said "Well what about mine? I just put it back on the market today" and I said "Just hold on Jim," went down there, looked at it and said "This is it, I'll take it."

It was already an organised design studio. It had phones. It had some computer connections and all that so that was a very lucky situation and then of course I put my own money in it and a little bit, half at the time, and the others pitched in too and the partners didn't take salary for the first three months or whatever it was and so we wiggled through. In fact, we left on a Thursday and on the Monday we were in business in a new place because we had some clients which we could tie over which literally helped us to sort of reorganise and not lose any income.

Ian Paget: Yeah, it's a fascinating way to approach the situation because if I understand right Tom and Ivan basically went off on their own and obviously they owned the Chermayeff, Geismar name, it's got their name on it, but they owned the company so the Partners even though you used their name, was that a whole separate business that was pretty much nothing to do with Tom and Ivan? That was... it was basically your business using their name?

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes. It was our business with clients that we took with us, of course. By the way, I forgot to say, the only person, which I had hired shortly before was Sagi Haviv and the only person who Ivan and Tom wanted to keep was him. They realised they wanted somebody young to do the conversion of their part, just the two of them working along was no longer possible because both of them were not very versed with the computer and they just needed employees. They needed people to work with them and Sagi who I hired out of Cooper Union was the perfect choice and so they just threw some money at him and he stayed so to be his partner.

Ian Paget: People, listeners will know of Sagi. I've interviewed him in the past on the podcast.

Steff Geissbuhler: Right. Very nice guy.

Ian Paget: Yeah, in terms of the logo design space online, he's recently released a training course and that course is phenomenal and obviously that's lessons that he's learned from yourself and Tom and Ivan but is... I think people are going to be interested in this story, would you mind talking through how you... because I understand it was you that hired him. Sagi Haviv has been very open about the story he shared online and in a number of videos. I'd love to hear your side of that story. I think the audience will be interested in that as well.

Steff Geissbuhler: It's been a little bit muddled and I just recently was quite upset about the situation that on their website, there's no history, there is no anything of where anything came from and who did what or whatever. They are simply showing the peacock and everything else.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I noticed that.

Steff Geissbuhler: That really irked me and that was earlier... sort of a point of contention because especially between Ivan and me because Ivan showed... was publicised all over the place and quite often with mine and Tom's work under his name and Tom never... like a good wife never complained and I did. I didn't want to lose my entire life under another name and as you know yourself as soon as something is publicised and re-publicised and repeated it becomes fact. That's what grinds on me to this day is that people who didn't really know the story, they just simply assume that Ivan was everything, Ivan did everything.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I will be honest with you I assumed it was either Tom or Ivan that worked on that peacock and it wasn't until I read in the book, it actually... it does say your name in the book so it is in there but if I didn't read that I wouldn't have realised and that's why I wanted to speak to you. I wasn't sure if you would get back to me but I was keen to hear your side.

Steff Geissbuhler: In fact, I spoke to the New York Times about when Ivan's obituary was published and of course all of these things were under his name and they actually did host the correction. They understood that it wasn't all his... especially, it's just was his name, his name was first. People sort of knew of him and his brother is a famous architect. His father was a famous architect and scholar. The name was out there where Tom's and mine obviously coming from Europe were not nearly as familiar to people but so wherever I could I tried to correct it and it irked me the other day when I looked at their website of Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv of what they're showing and not mentioning anything at all of any kind about it.

Ian Paget: Hopefully this podcast will help to provide some clarity and that's why one of the reasons why I wanted to speak to you because I made that assumption as well and I'm sure a lot of people will so it's good to get that clarity and I absolutely love the stories that you've shared with us so you just going back to the story again so in 2011 which would have been six years after you created the partners that's when you founded your own studio, is that when you kind of went off on your own?

Steff Geissbuhler: Yes. It was also that the company sort of veered from graphic design as their core talent or the core activity and got much more into exhibit and three-dimensional things and web design and all those kinds of things and more and more people sort of didn't come to us anymore for graphic design or logo design or branding of any kind. It was just too sparse to actually keep it going and I thought at that point you know that I should click out and do my own thing.

I was also you know a little older than everybody else. It was time. Time to do something else and I had... we got the presidential award and I got the AIGA medal and all that kind of stuff happened, that CBS broadcast was also out there so I thought it's coming to a certain point and I would be better off without partners for a change.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I think this interview's been incredible. Thank you for sharing all of the stories diving into your process. It's been fantastic so I think that the audience will enjoy it as well so thank you so much for your time.

Steff Geissbuhler: I hope so. I'm sorry if I muddled some things but do a good job with editing-

Ian Paget: Don't worry, I can tidy it up so don't worry, it was fantastic so thank you, I really do appreciate you taking the time out of your day, and canceling your tennis lesson to do this. It's been amazing, so thank you so much.

Steff Geissbuhler: So graphic designers don't retire, they just play tennis.