The Conceptual Logo
/This is part two of a three-part post about Paula Scher’s Citigroup Logo Story
In the last post, we ended on Curt Cloninger’s book, “Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers”.
I highly recommend it. For real. It’s really insightful. Incredibly easy to read. And it focuses on one of the most complicated, intriguing and yet, coolest and most exciting subjects known to man: creativity. I’ll leave the link here, so you can download the pdf for free, ok? But in case you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, then at least take a few minutes to read the pages I’m posting below.
Here’s why: the book has 254 pages, organized into 10 “major chapters” that cover about 50 different topics that somehow, to some degree, make up the fabric of what we call creativity. One of these topics is titled OVERVALUE THE CONCEPTUAL (needless to say, it’s my favorite topic of the book! ;o))
Well, here are the words the author chose to open up this topic.
“Overvalue the conceptual. If I had to give just one piece of advice, THIS WOULD BE IT.
You can’t value the conceptual enough.”
I mean, come on. If an introduction like that doesn’t make you dive into the pages below, then I don’t know what will.
The post continues right after the pages below. For now, I’ll leave you be so you can read them and I see you in a bit, ok?
Pretty awesome, right?
Now, let’s go back to what Cloninger said about Scher’s Citi logo, shall we?
“Citicorp and Travelers Group insurance had merged. And their new logo needed to combine aspects of each of their previous identities — the letters citi and the red travelers group umbrella — in a way that didn’t seem like a logo train wreck. Scher arrived at a simple CONCEPTUAL SOLUTION to a complicated design challenge.”
Hard to argue with him. He’s right. Absolutely right. But here’s the million dollar question: what exactly is a conceptual solution?
I bet if you ask a hundred people that same question, you’ll get a hundred different answers. And truth be told, I don’t even have ONE final, definitive answer, so I’ll just give you my two cents here instead, ok?
To me, conceptualizing has to do with simplifying things so that we may understand them better; or at all.
Everyone does it differently. The way I do it is by asking questions.
I ask questions.
And I ask questions.
And I keep asking them until I get to the point where I am able to recognize that I finally tapped into the TRUTH OF THE MATTER.
When that happens, things suddenly make sense, everything clicks and I’m in peace with the concept at hand.
In the case of the Citigroup logo, the truth of the matter was that when financial giants Citicorp and Travelers Group merged, it was a “politically fraught corporate merger”.
Mrs. Scher understood that.
She understood the stakes were super high (according to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the merger was the result of a deal valued between USD 70 and USD 83 BILLION).
She understood that there were a lot of people involved in this operation.
And she understood that, as far as the new Citigroup identity was concerned, it was her responsibility to do right by these people.
Or, as she wisely stated in her 2019 Netflix Abstract Episode, “design needs to take human behavior into account”.
In this case, it was the behavior of two humans in particular: Sanford Weill (chairman an CEO of Travelers Group) and John Reed (chairman and CEO of Citicorp).
“I know that there are people within corporate hierarchy whose opinions matter and they will determine what’s going to be done and not done”, Scher said on episode 104 of the Clever Podcast.
In other words, she knew from the get-go that, at least internally, the logo had to achieve one very specific goal: it had to reflect the merger EQUALLY.
If you’re wondering if she succeeded at that or not, here’s a fun test: take a look at Scher’s Citi logo below and try to pinpoint which of the two former companies received “preferential treatment”. Citibank or Travelers Insurance?
You can’t tell, right?
That’s because Mrs. Scher achieved the aforementioned goal with honors, by simply using the “t” in Citi (which was written in lowercase) as the handle for the old Traveler’s Insurance umbrella. It was an exceptionally brilliant solution, and an extremely conceptual one as well.
“I’m allowing my subconscious to take over, so that I can free associate. You have to be in a state of play to design. If you’re not in a state of play, you can’t make anything.”
The concept behind Scher’s logo was that, with the merger, the market would now have a “one-stop-shop” for financial products.
From credit cards and checking to insurance and investing, Citigroup now offered an umbrella of services, under which consumers would have access to Citicorp’s strengths of traditional banking and consumer finance, along with Travelers’ long experience in providing insurance and brokerage services.
During an interview in 2017 with 6sqft, an arm of CityRealty (a real state website), Mrs. Scher stated that “my goal is to make things last”.
Given the number of years Citigroup’s logo has been going strong (two decades and counting), all over the globe, without a single change or tweak, I believe it’s safe to say she’s achieved her goal.
There’s a reason why I believe the brand identity she created for Citigroup has stood the test of time: it’s because on that particular day, back in 1998, when Mrs. Scher grabbed that napkin after a meeting and started drawing on it, she didn’t just come up with a sketch. She came up with a concept.
And concepts, as we all know, are timeless.
Sources
1. ADC Hall of Fame http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/paula-scher/
2. Madame Architec https://www.madamearchitect.org/interviews/2020/7/16/paula-scher
3. Eye Magazine http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-paula-scher
4. Cloninger, C. (2007). Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, p.38.5. On Creativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foeV4ZML55s
6. Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/57935/wordsmith
7. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/07/news/citicorp-and-travelers-plan-to-merge-in-record-70-billion-deal-a-new-no.html
8. Clever Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBTLw1yPBk
9. Design Interview 1Q: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ddshhUa_VQ
10. Abstract Paula Scher Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCfBYE97rFk
11. https://www.6sqft.com/interview-paula-scher-on-designing-the-brands-of-new-yorks-most-beloved-institutions/
12. beyondtellerrand https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/berlin-2017/speakers/paula-scher