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From Clay to Steel: A History of the Desert Ranch Bird

Desert Ranch has always been about the joining of the land with its inhabitants in a way that works with and not against the topography. Prior to organized development of Desert Ranch, Dan Donahoe found something that would become the lasting symbol of Desert Ranch. It was a simple shard of pottery, and on it a native dweller many centuries prior had depicted a bird that he shared his desert home with. The developers of the modern Desert Ranch saw this as a perfect representation of what their development should become. The development would become that balance point in which the land supports its inhabitants and the inhabitants do not overwhelm the topography.


From its beginning, Desert Ranch would become a canvas for the designs of insightful architects such as Al Beadle, Gerry Jones, and Bing Hu, yet, not surprisingly, desert landforms were not the only thing to be graced with the makings of historic design. At the beginning of the development, in the mid 70s, nationally eminent graphics design firm Chermayeff & Geismar was hired to create a logo that would communicate the ethos of the connection between the land and the desert dwellers throughout all millennia. Their firm was already well known for having created logos for Chase Manhattan Bank in 1960, XEROX Corporation in 1968 and many others before taking on their work for Desert Ranch. Tom Geismar researched bird forms from artistic traditions in the area – including the piece of pottery that was discovered by Donahoe; and between 1973 and 76 birthed the Desert Ranch logo. Their firm would later go on to create nationally and internationally known logos for NBC, PBS, Mobil, Merck, Safeway, The EPA, The Rockefeller Center and The Women’s Tennis Association – to name a few of the more prominent of the many.


In 2003, Sagi Haviv, a young designer from Israel, began his work with Chermayeff & Geismar. One of his first projects was the award winning “Logomotion” film which has been featured in fine art exhibits around the world winning awards from Tokyo to New York. In this 10 minute video, they combine a selection of some of their most distinctive work over the history of their firm. Watch around the 7:40 mark for the Desert Ranch Bird. The Desert Ranch logo also appears in their book “TM, Trademarks Designed by Chermayeff & Geismar” pictured above.

Four decades later, the bird took on another form as the community fashioned several large scale steel replicas of the logo. Today, this iconic logo stands as a landmark at each of the three corners to the Desert Ranch Subdivision.

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