Blog

The NASA Graphics Standards Manual is #7 on my 10 Best Books for Themed Entertainment professionals. Why? Because this book offered a road map from governmental and corporate wastelands of graphic design to the promised land of a future world of colors, lettering, and order.

In 1972 the National Endowment for the Arts, launched the Federal Graphics Improvement program. In 1974, the NEA took aim at improving NASA’s “Meatball” logo and in 1975 Danne and Blackburn introduced the new Graphics Standards Manual. In addition to the new text logo, the Worm, it offered a comprehensive set of rules for applying the new graphics on everything from stationery to buildings to cargo vans to spaceships. It created a system. That system became a brand. And that brand inspired a new era of graphic design.

The new NASA Worm logo offered “a futuristic vision for an agency at the cutting edge” and certainly influenced the connected S in Star Wars, released in 1977, just as the NASA Meatball inspired Star Trek’s Fleet Command logo in 1966. As designers, from this point forward, if you wanted to portray space exploration, you had to reckon with the NASA logos as a starting point. Here’s a photo of me at Space Mountain in 1977 with my meatball-esque t-shirt. Much of the rest of the attraction was influenced by the NASA Worm lettering, in uniforms, wayfinding, signage and more.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and in 1958, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and added a very sputnik-looking baseball to their logo. Right about the same time as the new NASA GSM was released, the Houston Astros introduced their incredibly awesome “rainbow pullover” jerseys, claiming their rightful place at the forefront of astro-chic. Haters joked, “Houston, we have a problem.”

The NASA worm logo was confoundingly scrapped in 1992, perhaps because agency has more engineers than designers. Artist Tom Sachs continues to use the Worm as inspiration in much of his work. In 2015 a campaign for the reprinted GSM was launched, and in 2020 NASA started using the Worm again, particularly for manned space flights.

— Ryan Miziker