In Christopher Bonanos front-of-book essay about this design manual, he clearly points out the hazards that designers face in creating a new corporate look for an organization. Maybe the most difficult is when some of the top management don't agree with the aims of the corporate image of the two designers who created the NASA look. The brilliant logo was referred to as the worm (and management wanted to know why the cross bars were missing from the two As?) but it's a thousand times better than the two previous service marks designed by James Modarelli (he wasn't a designer).
Bruce Blackburn and Richard Danne, with a small design shop, created this very comprehensive design manual for NASA that was introduced in January 1976. It covers the use of the logo, stationary, forms, publications, signage and vehicles. Some pages that interested me, as a publication designer, were the examples of publications using a grid. The visual templates are quite comprehensive allowing anyone at NASA to create interesting-looking printed matter for internal use.
The vehicles pages include foldouts for a variety of vans, cars, buses, aircraft and spacecraft. There is also a foldout, in the Supplementary Guides, showing NASA clothing. Over the years after its introduction in 1976, the NASA corporate look slowly evaporated so that today the look is no look. The back of the book has twenty-two pages showing the NASA Manager's Guide from 1983. A sort of design manual lite.
The format of this book is to reproduce the original manual pages, which were printed on one side only, slightly smaller than the book's pages and with a faint creamy color. The manual was spiral bound with nine brown pages with tabs.
I thought the book was a fascinating creative document from the 1970s with visual ideas that still look fresh today.
No comments:
Post a Comment