This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

You've seen a logo that Tom Geismar has designed. You probably saw one today.

Xerox, Mobile Oil, NYU, PBS, Univision.

The Boston Public Transit Systems Mark is a T in a circle.

Tom Geismar did that. But his work and that of his longtime business partner,

Ivan Tremayev, who passed away in late 2017, is truly fused into the DNA of most modern logos you see today, whether they design them or not.

In 1961, the logo for Chase Bank that he designed, the blue octagon with the square in the middle was introduced. It's still used everywhere and is considered one of the first of its kind in the US

An abstract dynamic shape representing a giant company. The logo was a real sea change for Chase.

Well, Chase at that time was really Chase Manhattan Bank because it was the merger of two giant banks.

Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company.

And they had a logo which featured a map of the United States, a globe of the world, the wording, Chase Manhattan Bank, and a few other things. It was quite a mix.

And they were in the process of building the first modern skyscraper in the Wall Street area because a lot of the financial firms were moving up to midtown at that point.

David Rockefeller was in charge of that process,

though he was only third in command at the time

at the bank.

And he felt that it would be appropriate to have also a modern contemporary looking mark for this newly formed basically a merger of these of these two banks and we discussed with him the idea of maybe

we could just do something abstract because no one had any idea of a symbol of

banking other than the dollar sign.

And Chase was so big.

I mean, they were going to be the number one or number two.

And I remember the largest bank in the country.

They had advertising in the So the idea that you could establish something relatively abstract as their mark,

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