When International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) planned a new corporate advertising programme, the New York office of Needham, Louis and Brorby asked designer Carl Regehr to create a logo for the company. The brief had three parts. The logo needed to allude to the scientific work ITT was doing, its international reach and a corporate philosophy centred on its plants, products and people. This would replace the ITT monogram designed in 1958 by Sandgren & Murtha.
Regehr began by drawing each idea separately. Globes and circles offered a way to express the company’s reach. Vortex patterns, an echo chamber and a binary system suggested science. Networks and electrical symbols pointed towards communication. His sketches show the breadth of the search, but also the difficulty: a globe alone could say little about research, while a scientific diagram might be too specialised to represent the whole company.
