I've been looking for an excuse to buy the NASA Graphics Standard Manual. It looks like Standard Manual has published new books dedicated to the Worm and Bruce's work on the Bicentennial logo. Time to make room on my coffee table!
I still can’t fathom why NASA completely retired the worm in favor of the meatball from 1992 until last year. The worm looks like something from a high-art sci-fi movie, while the meatball looks like it’s from, well, 1959.
The time period covered by the worm originally represented a loss of greatness to NASA employees. It was an era of shrinking budgets, loss of focus, and unexpected loss of life (Challenger).
Because of that, the return to the meatball was intended as an internal morale boost, a look back to what NASA could be rather than what it was currently.
They do probably need to better balance public morale and internal morale, but it's a hard problem.
Born in the 70s and raised in teh 80s, I lived the worm logo, and still do, but I really feel the meatball logo is both deeply tied that era of the 50s/60s, but also timeless. It's a classy and classic logo.
> On Friday 22 May 1992, Goldin announced unexpectedly that the "worm" logo would be replaced by the traditional NASA blue "meatball" logo. It had been replaced in 1975 by the NASA red "worm" logo. By 1997, Goldin had started a largely successful campaign within NASA to eradicate the "worm". He would become infuriated and vulgar whenever he would see a "worm" logo that was not replaced.[2] By 1998 the "worm" logo had entirely disappeared from use both in uniforms and in equipment.
Because one NASA Administrator in the 90's f---'ing hated the worm with a passion. That's seriously all there is to it.
I worked at NASA about 10 years ago, before the worm revival. The logo was still visible on older equipment from that era, and everyone had a great deal of respect for its design elegance. But Dan Goldin made Worm vs. Meatball a political fight that people still had PTSD from. It took a crafty political outsider like Jim Bridenstein to find a solution that everyone could be happy with.
I think it also helps that after the Shuttle was retired with no successor, people now look back at the worm days (which were the glory days of the Shuttle) with nostalgia.
The worm is objectively a better logo. It has less details, can be simplified in painting on large scale (rockets) and it is extremely iconic from any distance and any color. B/W image of worm is easy, try that with the meat ball.
Logo design for the worm was exceptional in everyway. It was thrown away for reasons of executive team wanting to do something new.
I am always an advocate of logos that can be represented in black-and-white or 3 shades of gray at most. In addition to looking good when printed in monotone, they also are easy to engrave in granite/concrete - here's the Worm logo in Granite. Try that with the Meatball.
https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/background/...
The worm logo is taught in design school. Like the FedEx arrow, it has become a textbook example of classic design. It also harkens back to the UI elements of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is a very positive link for the NASA brand (although the causality is backwards--the worm inspired the Star Trek set designer).
I agree with the qualities that make a good logo, but it's also very much a product of its time. SF Muni adopted a worm logo around the same time, and it looks equally gimmicky and dated.
Former NASA administrator Dan Goldin was obsessed with getting rid of the worm. He even wanted to have a "Meatball" logo sticker applied on top of the worm during a Hubble service mission apparently.
He was reportedly prone to fits of rage when he saw a worm logo. Very Dilbertian.
The page you linked to on the NASA website does mention the worm logo, though its image quality is a bit visibly compressed. Perhaps it’s a recent addition.
Agreed; they're both really dated. There's potentially more to worth with when redesigning the meatball because it's not just a wordmark, but it has too much going on, and simplifying the elements doesn't give you anything meaningful.
https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics-standards...
https://standardsmanual.com/products/the-worm
https://standardsmanual.com/products/american-revolution-bic...