La valse des logos à la NASA
Deux articles sur la bataille interne à la NASA pour choisir le logo apposé sur les fusées et satellites (et le reste des activités spatiales de l’Agence). Un aller-retour stylistique intéressant.
$79 for an Out-of-Date Book About a Modern NASA Logo - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/science/space/79-for-an-out-of-date-book-about-a-modern-nasa-logo.html
For $79 plus shipping, you can buy a reprint of a long-obsolete federal government publication.
The captivating title? “National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics Standards Manual.”
It may not be a page turner, but among certain design and space aficionados, it is a cherished piece of history.
A Kickstarter campaign begun on Tuesday will produce a high-quality hardcover printing of this bureaucratic relic. In 1975, NASA adopted a new logo, a minimalist twisting of letter forms that soon gained the nickname “the worm.” The standards manual, published a year later, prescribed how the space agency should deploy the logo across its publications, signs, aircraft, vehicles and spacecraft.
“It is a wonderful example of modernist design thinking that was prevalent in the ’70s and the ’60s,” said Hamish Smyth, a designer at the firm Pentagram. “To me as a designer, technically, it’s pretty perfect.”
The linear treatment that would become the worm was a simplification of letter forms that embodied “the technological base of the agency and had some future orientation as well,” Mr. Blackburn said. “It was extremely simple. It was direct.”
In the logo, the two A’s lack crossbars, suggestive of a rocket nose cone or an engine nozzle.
When Mr. Blackburn and Mr. Danne presented it to NASA’s leaders, they made sure to show how it would look “applied to a lot of real things,” Mr. Danne said. “We knew in the presentation maybe it would be too abstract, too theoretical.”
But James C. Fletcher, then NASA’s administrator, was skeptical about the missing crossbars. Mr. Danne recalled Dr. Fletcher saying, “I just don’t feel we are getting our money’s worth!”
Mr. Blackburn said he had returned to the office and tried to make a more conventional A. “You kill the baby when you do that,” he said. “They ultimately caved in.”
With the graphics standards manual, NASA began rolling out its new look.
But even a decade and a half later, many at NASA still hated the logo — too sterile, too much Spock and not enough Captain Kirk.
The change did not happen overnight. The worm logo remained on the space shuttles until they were refurbished beginning in 1998.
The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, carries it still. So does the first space shuttle, the Enterprise, now on exhibit at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. The Enterprise was used for glide tests but never went into space, and never received the updated markings.
The worm also lives on in Washington at the NASA headquarters building, which opened in 1992, the year Mr. Goldin banished the logo. But it was already prominently carved in stone on the outside.
“I didn’t know that,” Mr. Blackburn said. “Well, hallelujah. The good guys won one.”
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NASA’s ‘Worm’ Logo Will Return to Space - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/nasa-logo-worm-spacex.html
NASA’s ‘Worm’ Logo Will Return to Space
The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May.