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One of the most spectacular corporate consolidations of the late 1980s resulted from the acquisition of Warner Communications by Time, Inc., in which the flashy, West Coast stylishness of Warner confronted the Ivy League, East Coast traditionalism of Time. In 1990, Time Warner commissioned Chermayeff & Geismar Inc. to symbolize the massive new conglomerate with a logo that would reconcile the company's clash of cultures.
Among the proposed designs was an evocative icon that merged a schematic eye with a spiraling interpretation of an ear. Designer Steff Geissbuhler (interview) commented on his design shortly after its release: "Warner is primarily entertainment, Time is essentially journalism. So a common denominator needed to be much broader: looking and listening, reading and hearing, receiving and sending....I believe the time has come to bring back more symbolic marks when possible and appropriate, because we've been oversaturated with abstractions and letterforms....Of course, all this has to be reviewed in a year or two, and then we'll see if we were right." In 1993, Time Warner replaced the evocative eye/ear symbol with a neutral typographic treatment of the company's name; Chermayeff & Geismar's unusual symbol proved too strong a statement for Time Warner, a vast conglomerate that encompasses numerous separate brand identities having their own distinctive visual marks. The hieroglyph is now used only to identify Time Warner Cable. The eye/ear logo premiered a few weeks after the publication of Time Warner's 1989 annual report, designed by Frankfurt Gips Balkind, a design and advertising firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Provocatively titled Why? the annual report was greeted in the press as a surprising new approach to business communications that mixed the visual languages of mass culture with corporate communications. Reflecting the influence of Spy and other magazines, the designers favored icons, photographs, and chunks of commentary over running text. They translated dense pages of financial information into a double-page spread of charts and graphs, peppered with photographs of Madonna and Bugs Bunny. According to partner Aubrey Balkind, "We took things from surf culture, fashion, and media, and we brought them into corporate communications. We don't claim to have invented anything new, but we brought these forms into a new place." Time Warner's 1989 annual report exemplified the ability of a major corporation to project an image of its own culture by absorbing the languages of smaller ones. The concept of "corporate culture"--a set of shared attitudes ranging from dress codes and taste in furniture to meeting styles, lines of power, and patterns of decision-making--has gained increasing prestige in the professional parlance of image management. In a 1991 promotional booklet, Frankfurt Gips Balkind predicted the convergence of corporate communications with mainstream media and argued that a company would benefit from including a mix of "counter-cultures" in its overall framework rather than aspiring to express a single, monolithic personality. Such developments have been praised as a progressive recognition of diversity and critiqued as a process that deadens differences by converting them into commodities.
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Time Warner
Time Warner 1989 Annual Report |
