the worm and the meatball

a cute little history of the development of NASA's graphic image:

Up until that point, NASA had been primarily using an insignia adapted by James Modarelli, the head of NASA’s Lewis Research Center Reports Division. This logo, created in 1959 and affectionately dubbed “The Meatball,” relied heavily on multiple visual metaphors. According to NASA’s Web site, “the sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing aeronautics (the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and then there is an orbiting spacecraft going around the wing.” Although charming in its quirkiness, the meatball proved difficult to reproduce given the printing technology available at the time and the variety of applications it would need to adorn.

Enter Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn. They were hired to create, in Danne’s words, “a more useful new Logotype.” In a recently completed, yet to be published memoir, Danne describes the streamlined new design as “clean, progressive, could be read from a mile away, and was easy to use in all mediums.” Danne and Blackburn replaced the complex meatball with a stripped-down, modernist interpretation where even the cross stroke of the A’s were removed. 

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Seventeen years later, despite its winning the prestigious “Award of Design Excellence” by The Presidential Design Awards, NASA scrapped the Danne and Blackburn design and re-instated “The Meatball.” Danne thinks this was at least partly due to how NASA chose to introduce the new logo to its various internal agencies in the first place. He says the redesign was kept secret until letters were set out to every center director … on their new stationery. Those loyal to the old design were offended, and a rivalry between “The Meatball” and the new design (unaffectionately dubbed “The Worm”) began. (via)