NASA has recently released more than eight thousand photos of the Apollo program for the public to download through their website. These images of the moon have surely evoked the space travel dream in a lot of people. Coincidentally, a space related project has recently appeared on Kickstarter. This project aims to raise funds for the reprinting of the “NASA Graphics Standards Manual”, and the project has already reached its target. We shall be seeing the relaunch of this design manual, which represents NASA’s significant achievement in the near future.
It was during 1972, when the Apollo 17 has completed their historic trip to the moon. Yet, that was also when the boom for aerospace started depleting. At the time, President Richard Nixon (NEA) pushed the US National Endowment for the Arts to start the “Federal Graphics Improvement Program”. This program was intended to update the chaotic image of the different government institutions, and NASA was one of the participating organizations. The company responsible for rebranding NASA, was the then new design company Danne & Blackburn. Danne & Blackburn have not only unified and completed various visual elements for NASA, it has also designed the extremely classic “Worm” logo for them. The first “NASA Graphics Standards Manual” which was published in 1975 was literally the report card for Danne & Blackburn. It lists out all the projects that they have done during the period, which was what has transformed NASA. Unfortunately, 18 years after this book was published, it was removed from the shelves in 1992, and disappeared for 20 years.
The founder of this project, is designer duo Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth. They believe that this book not only records the milestone of NASA’s design, its appearance, rationality, and systematic design thinking also makes it a quality text book for the design industry, not to mention that it is an important piece of work in history. Through the duo’s networking, they have received the official agreement from the original author Richard Danne to levy reprint, where the 200 page book will be republished as a hardcover. Apart from including original content, the new edition will also include a foreword written by Danne, as well as other material and information which has never been disclosed. This should attract the attention of a lot of NASA and design fans.
