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NASA has had a few logos in its time: the worm from 1974 -- 1992, and the meatball before and after. The worm was the product of a high end design shop which also produced a 90 page manual outlining its use on all things NASA -- that design manual is being reprinted as part of a kickstarter project.
Inside the Rise and Fall of NASA's Beloved Worm Logo:
"I used manuals just like this—it's what I learned from," Reed says. "They're still so relevant even though they were designed 40 years ago." ... Throughout its 40-year lifespan, the NASA manual has become a cherished piece of graphic design history, both for the quality of the work and for the dramatic lore surrounding it.
[...] While considered a victory for graphic design, many of NASA's employees hated it. ... NASA's first logo ... was a mess by graphic design standards, hard to reproduce, difficult to scale, and, frankly, corny. "I think the meatball has a folksy cuteness, a sort of nostalgic look and feel to it," Smyth says. "But I don't think it's appropriate for a space agency."
[...] Despite its execution and nuance, it seems the worm was doomed to fail. As legend has it, Dan Goldin, NASA's newly appointed administrator, arrived at Langley Research Center one Thursday in May of 1992 and noticed the meatball was still on the hangar. "They never did remove the meatball," Barry, the historian, says. "And they took a very long time to getting around to painting the new logotype on the building." NASA was in a slump at the time, and Goldin saw an opportunity to boost morale. He asked George Abbey, his special assistant, and Paul Holloway, the director of Langley, if he could reinstate the meatball. Yes, they replied, and you should.
And so it was. Like an indecisive lover, NASA dumped the worm and made up with the meatball the very next day. ... This time, it was NASA that loved the logo and the designers who hated it.
There must be a lesson here of some kind for designers. When I look at the worm, I see nothing really -- just letters seemingly optimized for spray paint stencils. The meatball reminds me of Asimov, Star Trek, and all the things in the future of which NASA will be the ancient precursor. You can hear in the video on the Kickstarter, and in the tone of the Wired article, a sort of pouty derision from the designers, but I think it is they who failed to understand their client.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gman003 on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:42PM
Where do you, a member of the general public, see the NASA logo most often? On vehicles. Generally very big ones, given the nature of the business, but on many spacecraft, flat space to put a logo is at a premium (on stacked rockets, the vehicle is far taller than wide; on winged landers, the wings are very short and stubby).
The meatball logo is not optimized for high-visibility, large-scale use. It works fine on research papers, but it's not good for being emblazoned on spacecraft. It has too many fine details, and the proportion of space devoted to the name is rather low. Look at worm-logo versus meatball-logo Space Shuttles [wikimedia.org] - to fit the meatball on the wing legibly, they had to remove the additional "USA" text (which admittedly was unnecessary but it shows how much more space-efficient the worm logo was). And it's still at about half the font size.
The worm logo wasn't perfect. It was a bit overly minimalist - it doesn't signify "space" in particular. But it was a lot better-designed for its specific purpose than the meatball logo was, and if I were to redesign NASA's logo, I'd start from the worm, not the meatball.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday September 05 2015, @11:54PM
I guess we disagree. I like the meatball styles better.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VortexCortex on Sunday September 06 2015, @01:54AM
Well, if you look closely at that image you linked, the only one with the worm logo blew up.
I rest my case.