Corporate identity design, which took shape in the 1950s, aims to unite an often incongruous mix of people and products in a collective fictional personality.

The field of corporate identity reached full flower in the 1970s.

The grip of institutional blandness was loosened by the visual program created for Citibank by the New York consultancy Anspach Grossman Portugal in 1975.

A prominent symbol of its era was produced for AT&T by the Los Angeles firm Bass & Yager following AT&T's breakup in 1984.

In 1990, Lippincott & Margulies designed an identity program for Continental Airlines that replaced the circle-cum-runway logo the company had used since the 1970s.

Debuting in the same year as AT&T's striped sphere was Prudential Insurance Company of America's striped rock, an extreme simplification of the Rock of Gibraltar drawings that had symbolized the company since 1896.

The ability to mix the simple, unornamented forms favored by modernism with culturally legible content is seen in logos designed by Woody Pirtle.

Such witty hieroglyphics might prove too specific for a corporation like Time-Warner, whose reach borders on the infinite.

The corporate communications of Harley-Davidson Inc. have negotiated nimbly between the different cultures the company serves, from bikers and Harley employees to the financial community. The company's 1993 Global Communications Guidelines, created by Siegel & Gale, makes light of the restrictions such guides enforce.

In 1994, the New York Public Theater transformed its visual identity, and the streets of the city, with a program of posters, flyers, banners, and other paraphernalia designed by Paula Scher at Pentagram.

Designers visualize the character of innumerable organizations, from global businesses to local theaters and museums. Design for institutions has come to embrace values of complexity over simplicity, as restrictive systems have made way for open grammars and legible icons.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum