A dye company, a laboratory and a coined word.

Bayer Aspirin is a brand built on a single coined word, and the company behind it began as a dye business. English Wikipedia says Bayer was founded in 1863 in Barmen, now part of Wuppertal, as a partnership between the dye salesman Friedrich Bayer and the dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott, and that the chemistry of aniline dyes led the firm into other fields over the following decades, pharmaceuticals among them.

The product that made the name came out of that move. The Science History Institute’s biography of the chemist Felix Hoffmann says that in 1897, while working at Bayer, Hoffmann synthesised acetylsalicylic acid, the compound that became aspirin. English Wikipedia adds that the role of another Bayer chemist, Arthur Eichengrün, has long been disputed, and that sources conflict over who did what; it says that Bayer scientists began studying the compound in 1897 and that by 1899 Bayer had named it “Aspirin” and was selling it around the world, citing Charles Mann and Mark Plummer’s 1991 book The Aspirin Wars.

The word itself is a piece of naming design. Wikipedia explains it as a blend: a- for the acetyl group, -spir- from Spirsäure, the German name for the acid originally isolated from meadowsweet, a plant then classed in the genus Spiraea, and -in, a common ending for drug names at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the United States the name was registered early. The 1921 federal court opinion in Bayer Co. v. United Drug Co., published by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, records that Bayer’s German predecessor registered “Aspirin” as a trademark in the United States on 5 May 1899, and that the American patent on the compound was issued on 27 February 1900 and ran until 27 February 1917.

A visual mark followed five years later. German Wikipedia says the Bayer Cross — the name BAYER written once across and once down, sharing the central Y and set inside a circle — was registered with the Imperial Patent Office on 6 January 1904, replacing a lion emblem the company had used since 1881. English Wikipedia says that from 1910 the cross was stamped onto each aspirin tablet, while German Wikipedia dates its embossing on medicine packaging to the same year. Either way, by 1910 the cross had moved from the letterhead onto the product itself.

Seized in 1918, held by Sterling, bought back in 1994.

The First World War split the brand in two. English Wikipedia says that during the war Bayer’s assets in the United States and Canada, including the rights to its name and trademarks, were confiscated, and that they were acquired by Sterling Drug. Wikipedia’s history of Sterling says the company had been founded in 1901 in Wheeling, West Virginia, as the Neuralgyline Company, by Albert H. Diebold and the pharmacist William E. Weiss, and that in 1918 it bought the American assets of the German Bayer company under the Alien Property Custodian Act. From then on, in the United States, the name Bayer and the Bayer Cross on an aspirin bottle belonged to an American company with no ownership link to Leverkusen.

The two sides soon reached arrangements. Wikipedia says a 1920 agreement between Sterling and Bayer covered selling aspirin in Latin American markets, and that the American Bayer company owned by Sterling kept the right to use the Bayer brand for aspirin in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.

The word “Aspirin” itself was contested in the American courts in the same years. In 1921, in Bayer Co. v. United Drug Co., Judge Learned Hand of the federal court in New York granted an injunction against selling the drug as “Aspirin” to manufacturing chemists, physicians and retail druggists, but none for sales to the public, finding that consumers had come to know the word as the name of the drug itself. English Wikipedia says Bayer lost the trademark in the United States and some other countries in actions taken between 1918 and 1921, and that “Aspirin”, with a capital A, remains a registered Bayer trademark in Germany, Canada, Mexico and many other countries.

In Germany the parent company went through its own changes. English Wikipedia says Bayer became part of the IG Farben conglomerate in 1925; that after the Second World War the Allied authorities split IG Farben up in 1951, when Bayer was re-formed as Farbenfabriken Bayer AG; and that the company took the name Bayer AG in 1972. In 1978 it bought the American firm Miles Laboratories, the maker of Alka-Seltzer and One-A-Day vitamins, but in the United States it still did not hold the right to its own name on aspirin.

That changed in the 1990s. Wikipedia says Sterling was acquired by Eastman Kodak in 1988, and that in August 1994 Kodak sold what remained of Sterling Winthrop, including its over-the-counter business, to SmithKline Beecham. In September 1994 Bayer bought the over-the-counter division for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico from SmithKline Beecham and merged it with Miles, reclaiming the American and Canadian rights to the name Bayer and the Bayer Cross. Bayer AG has owned Bayer Aspirin in the United States since 1994.

Design and documentation.

Over-the-counter remedy brands live on a crowded shelf, and their identities have to work at the distance of an aisle and at the closeness of a medicine cabinet. Much of that work is done by colour: a carton colour held steady over many years, a tablet, caplet or liquid with a colour of its own, and a logotype set large enough to be read at a glance.

These brands also carry text that design does not control. Packs for remedies sold without a prescription usually include a regulatory panel whose layout, headings and wording are shaped by the rules of each market, so the brand’s own voice has to sit beside a block of standard information rather than replace it.

Sound has played a part as well. Radio and television advertising gave many remedy names a slogan or a jingle, and for some the tune became as recognisable as the pack. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name, colours and advertising have changed, keeping to what dated sources record.

A mark small enough for a pill and large enough for a skyline.

The Bayer Cross is the part of the identity that has travelled furthest. It works at two extremes of scale. At the smallest, English Wikipedia describes it stamped onto each aspirin tablet from 1910, so that the product carried its maker’s name even outside the box. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia holds a Bayer Aspirin pillbox in its collections, catalogued as a twelve-tablet size and dated 1930–1949.

At the other end of the scale, German Wikipedia records the illuminated crosses at Bayer’s works in Leverkusen. An earlier cross was switched on on 20 February 1933, hung between two power-station chimneys; it was switched off in 1939 under wartime blackout rules and dismantled in 1944. The present cross was installed in 1958 on two steel masts and overhauled in 2003. When plans were discussed to replace it with a display on the facade of the company’s tower, supporters of the football club Bayer 04 Leverkusen, whose own badge contains the cross, began a campaign called “Das Kreuz muss bleiben” (“The cross must stay”), and on 4 December 2007 Bayer announced that the cross would not be taken down. Its bulbs were replaced with LEDs in August and September 2009.

The word has had a different life from the mark. In Canada, where Bayer kept the trademark, English Wikipedia notes that store-brand products are sold under the generic name “ASA”, for acetylsalicylic acid, while “Aspirin” remains Bayer’s trademark. In the United States, where the word is generic, a photograph on the same Wikipedia page shows Bayer bottles with yellow labels and the name Bayer in black, with the small words “genuine aspirin”. Today Bayer’s consumer health division manages Bayer Aspirin alongside Aleve, according to Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Bayer Aspirin shows how a coined word can slip out of its owner’s hands while a geometric monogram of the company name stays put — on the tablet, on the tin and on the skyline. Compare it with Aleve, which Bayer also sells, and Tylenol. For this guide we use cross green and label yellow on tablet white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bayer Aspirin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.