NASA Worm Logo User Guide Update
Keith’s note: As I noted last week there is a Kickstarter effort to recreate the NASA 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual – the document that spelled out how NASA’s new logo aka the worm logo – was to be used by the agency. Very retro cool. So what does NASA do they release the document online for free. Why not – its a government document. One small problem: the NASA online version is a pathetically ugly scan of the document whereas the Kickstarter team is going to make their version look as nice as the original.
By all means the Reissue of the 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual on Kickstarter will be a vastly superior product. They exceeded their original $158,000 and are now at $683,456. Please support it.
The Care and Feeding of the NASA Worm Logo, earlier post
Keep the meatball. It’s only symbolic, but it does link to the time when NASA did great things.
For the worm, all I can think of is “lame.” (The fact that the worm clones the logo of the Canadian National railway just adds to the lameness.)
OK, part of that is the lameness of 1975 itself — children, repeat after me, “Let’s all Whip Inflation Now!” — and the looming Carter disasters. But to call the worm “retro” as if it held any kind of coolness whatever is simply nuts.
It was a bad time for NASA and the nation. Best buried and forgotten.
I prefer the worm. It is easier to recognize and being rectangular much easier to include as a graphic. I do not particularly want to reminisce about “the time when NASA did great things”. I would rather remember the time when NACA did useful things.
Billions (yes) of people around the world know of NASA, largely because of missions that flew under the meatball. Can’t say that about the worm.
NACA? NACA?? Do you travel on Ford Tri-motor aircraft often? Or DC-3s? C’mon, get real.
Should all of us light a candle to the “aeronautics” part of “NASA”? Well, I will, because I fly commercially often, and the planes I ride on stay in the air at least in part because of efforts going back to NACA.
But we’ve moved on from NACA’s heyday, and if NASA is still around half a century from now, I strongly doubt if more than one person in a million will be aware what the first “A” in NASA stands for.
You really are rather ignorant of what NASA has done and when they did these things, aren’t you? i.e.’Billions (yes) of people around the world know of NASA, largely because of missions that flew under the meatball. Can’t say that about the worm” You forgot Voyagers 1 & 2, Vikings 1 & 2, Hubble, Cassini, Galileo, Pioneer Venus, Mariner 10, dozens of Shuttle missions, etc. All of which were done while the worm was used and most of which have the worm on the spacecraft themselves. If you are going to wave your arms here at least do a little research first.
The future leadership of the world will be based on economics. Aerospace (aircraft, launch vehicles, spacecraft and launch services) is one of the few areas where American manufacturing can compete with the world, bringing value added exports and high tech jobs. NACA was not created to build the DC-3. It was created (in 1915) to act as a partner with American industry to finance the long lead R&D and high risk prototypes that industry could not do on its own, and with the help of NACA the American civil aviation industry came to lead the world. NACA was founded to create practical benefits for America and NASA, if it is to remain relevant, needs to do the same. By emphasizing the fantastic past, the meatball may distract us from a more productive and practical future.
As soon as I saw this on Kickstarter I had to have it – the lure of the complete package as sold to NASA and the promise of beautiful, caring production was like a black hole, and sucked me in! This looks like a real classic.
Why should we support a project to recreate a 1975 manual?
Apparently there are people who are – with their own money – because the want a copy!
Well, documents on how to use a logo don’t excite me. But I’d love to see the ICD or test plan documents for the instruments on Voyager. Those are also mid-1970s NASA documents. Historically and as a contrast to current practices, I’d find them very interesting. People more interested in public relations and marketing may feel the same way about this logo document. It’s a narrow but quite real audience.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that scan looked pathetically ugly. It just looks like a fairly standard scan of an old document – one that has been superseded by newer revisions. Why the hyperbole?
Glancing at the Kickstarter, I see that this isn’t just a re-issue or recreation of the original document. With the addition of a forward and an essay about NASA culture (including interviews, scans of old NASA photographs, and images from the presentation by the design firm), this is more akin to a coffee table art book.
It sounds like an interesting project.
The meatball was more than a classic logo, it defined an era! When NASA returned to the meatball, the suggestion of our esteemed website owner Keith, should have been accepted. The NASA worm should have been the script in the meatball. A classic marriage of the old and the new. It would have been an instant classic in it’s own right.
Okay, I just gotta ask..how did they get the NASA worm off the Hubble telescope?
The worm logo is still there. They never removed it or covered it up. It is peeling a bit though.