Over at Display, Graphic designer Richard Danne tells the story of the fantastic "worm" logo he and partner Bruce Blackburn created for NASA in 1974. It was used for almost twenty years until the NASA administrator Dan Goldin unfortunately reinstated the previous "meatball" logo, developed in 1959.
“The worm is a great-looking word mark and looked fantastic on the spacecraft,” famed Pentagram designer Michael Bierut once said. “By any objective measure, the worm was and is absolutely appropriate, and the meatball was and is an amateurish mess.”
"The NASA Design Program" (Display, via Juxtapoz)
And don't miss Danne and Blackburn's original National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Graphics Standards Manual (Flickr)
And here's NASA's history of the "meatball logo."
