I just went inside to do some shopping at Target and see the mass culture culmination
of a brief and beautiful bubble in design history. The United States Federal government's
flirtation with really hip design. It is a story that includes Richard Nixon, amazing
grids, and the sexiest logotype the world has ever seen, the NASA worm. But it's
also the story of how that cutting edge design... stopped.
In the 1970s, there was a mini-revolution in the U.S. Federal Government's graphic design.
It went from largely staid to abstract and bold. How did this happen? There were highlights
before the seventies, think WPA posters, but design was in a slump. Then something, something
changed. Compare NASA's seventies, disco styling with the 1969 Apollo 11 Press Kit that looks
like a fifties kids' collage.
To be clear: I love this press kit, but there was a big change that happened from the late
sixties to the seventies. Whatever you think of it. There is a cult around this bold seventies,
Federal Government aesthetic. The most famous product is the NASA graphics standards manual. With
its NASA red, logo known as the worm, and paper doll like drawings. To reprint that manual,
there was a big Kickstarter in the mid 2010s that kicked off a hipster standards
fan club publishing firm. That NASA manual was soon joined by the republication of seventies
era works for the National Parks System, and the EPA. They did not get to the USPS one. But it's
there. This flurry of bold design came from somewhere and the source—
well, listen to him talk about the transformative power of art: "A lot of people that have everything
and have nothing. And there are a lot of people that have very little and have everything.
That's really what these people in the arts ought to be doing to tell people."
Yes, it's Richard Nixon, but you also need to know who he is talking to.
"Yeah. Uh, Len?"
It's his good buddy Leonard Garment, a former jazz player. He was a lawyer who cared about Nixon and the arts. He wrote this memo to Nixon in 1969, just as the National
Foundation of the Arts and Humanities, which had created the NEH and NEA was about to lose funding.
"For an amount of money minuscule in total budget terms, you can demonstrate your commitment
to reordering national priorities and to emphasizing the quality of life in our society."
Nixon, as you heard, he was like, (stunningly good Nixon impression ensues) "Art is so important. It's so important in our lives."
That's my Nixon impression. Nixon as a YouTuber, "Please, please like, and subscribe. I beg
you." So he asks for $40 million — a pittance in the federal budget, but a ton of money
for the NEA at the time. And he got it. It was led by this woman, Nancy Hanks. That money
got chopped up, but Hanks created the Federal Design Improvement Program in 1972.
With that NEA money, it got divided into an architecture program and the Federal Graphics
Improvement Program. We'll focus on that, because it made the worm happen.
So what did the Federal Graphics Improvement Program actually do in practice? It's kind of complicated. I'm way
too bad of a designer to speak to the quality of the designs that came out.
But I can tell you a bit about the mishmash of output that this program resulted. The
first issue of a newsletter, Federal Design Matters, gave an update. 40 experts basically
analyzed and critiqued images by eight government agencies. That introduction of private energy
into Federal design process continued in Design Assemblies, big 800 person conventions.
Like this one, where a bunch of government and private designers discussed good design and the design
future while reviewing stuff like the new super abstract Department of Labor publications.
Anyway, they "seventiesified" the Department of Agriculture to it. A big goal of these redesigns
wasn't necessarily designed sexiness, but costs and efficiency.
They needed to streamline all that paper production. Panel quote: "For instance, in one agency,
we have counted 37 different publication sizes. We feel we can get into four vertical formats
in one horizontal format."
So there are these design conventions that are working to basically distribute design grooviness to a bunch of different Federal government designers and
hope that something sticks.
And then there are big redesigns at certain Federal agencies, sometimes paid for by NEA
money, often funded by the agencies themselves. It's pretty complicated in each particular
case, but a lot of the time, it's just government agencies hiring design firms with a new aesthetic.
I'd assumed that these graphics standards manuals were made by people at the agencies,
but they weren't.
They were brought in by design agencies that won the contract. NASA worm designer. Richard
Danne described the process on NASA's podcast, and it wasn't super different from designing
a logo for really nice toothpaste. "I don't know that they felt they needed to redesign
particularly, though they knew they were in a bit of trouble.
They, we were, we were adopting things that were very commonplace in, uh, in the corporate
world. And I was to create a, uh, document style manual that would be used by just everybody."
Legendary designer, Massimo Vignelli made something more like a design system, a grid
design manifesto, which helped out the National Park Service.
But these were scattershot efforts, a sugar boost of hipness coming from the outside,
not a big new program to change the Federal design system.
You know, when your work or school will bring in a speaker and they tell you about the magic
of sculpting, or how cool their trip to Tibet was? Well, sometimes that can spark brainstorms
and new ideas, but nobody would mistake it for a major initiative. And that's kind of
what was going on here. The Federal government was bringing in these outside sources to spruce
things up.
But they weren't changing the design system in a fundamental way.
And it showed, because the graphics didn't change a ton beyond those manuals and some
spare use cases. The Federal Graphics Improvement Program ended in 1981. The EPA canned their new
logo in favor of the old, because Reagan era EPA had Anne Gorsuch said, "I want my daisy back."
And in 1992, after spotty use. NASA ditched the worm and went back to the meatball.
What is the, the actual takeaway here? I think we'd like to imagine this is how these institutions
worked, that they were super organized and competent, but also surprisingly hip too.
That is not really the case. These manuals were a fluke, you throw money and zeitgeist at something
and yeah, you will get some cool cultural artifacts.
How can you not love this NASA car drawing? But if you don't have a process, and in the
case of the Federal government, a bureaucracy powerful enough to rein everybody in. Well,
then you have to hope that Richard Nixon has a jazz living friend, or that Nancy Hanks is
a fan of design, or that somebody at the EPA will forget about her daisy. In 2020, NASA reinstated
the worm as a secondary logo.
And, you know, it's, it's fun. It's cool to look at, but the thing is is that you can't
be retro without having first gone away.
Okay. That's it for this one. I'm actually going to go return these shirts right now.
Don't tell anybody, uh, this is my first video since reaching a thousand subscribers. I'm
so grateful to all of you all. It's been really awesome. Uh, I got my lens back too. So this
has been a good week and I really appreciate you being here.
You subscribing, and commenting, and letting me know what you think of the design and the
history behind it — of these important standards manuals and logos. All right, off to the return counter.