How the US government got hip graphic design — and then lost it

Source: How the US government got hip graphic design — and then lost it, Phil Edwards, 8:50, uploaded 2021-08-22, playlist index 1566.

Phil Edwards begins outside a Target after shopping for clothes. The store becomes the mass-culture endpoint of a short period in which the United States federal government made unusually bold graphic design. The period produced the NASA worm, strict grids, abstract publications, and graphics standards manuals that now circulate as design objects. The question is how that style appeared inside a large bureaucracy and why it disappeared.

The brief federal design bubble

Federal graphic design changed sharply between the late 1960s and the 1970s. Edwards compares NASA’s 1970s identity with the 1969 Apollo 11 press kit, which he describes as a 1950s children’s collage. He likes the earlier press kit, so the comparison is about the change in visual language rather than a simple ranking of good and bad design. The federal government moved from a largely staid appearance towards abstract forms, strong colour, and orderly systems.

The NASA graphics standards manual became the best-known object from this period. Its red NASA worm and paper-doll-like drawings helped turn an internal identity document into a collectible. A Kickstarter in the mid-2010s funded a reprint and helped create the market around standards-manual publishing. Reprints followed for the National Park Service and the EPA, whilst the USPS manual remained out of reach for the publisher Edwards mentions. The manuals are now treated as evidence of a moment when government design looked unusually self-aware.

Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon, and the money for art

The programme’s origin sits with Leonard Garment, a lawyer and former jazz player who worked closely with Richard Nixon and cared about the arts. In 1969, as the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities faced a funding crisis, Garment wrote Nixon a memo arguing that a small federal outlay could show a commitment to the quality of life. Nixon asked for $40 million. Edwards presents that amount as small in the context of the federal budget and large for the National Endowment for the Arts at the time. Nixon received the money.

Nancy Hanks led the agency. In 1972, she created the Federal Design Improvement Program, which divided the new resources between architecture and graphic design. The Federal Graphics Improvement Program became the part that produced the identities and manuals people now remember. The programme therefore began through a funding decision and an interest in public culture rather than through a long-built federal design office.

Conventions, critiques, and the spread of a style

The Federal Graphics Improvement Program had several ways to put design expertise into federal work. The first issue of the newsletter Federal Design Matters described a process in which 40 experts analysed and critiqued material from eight government agencies. The programme also held Design Assemblies, large conventions where government and private designers discussed the future of design whilst reviewing new work.

The examples carried a practical purpose alongside their visual ambition. The Department of Labor produced highly abstract publications, and the Department of Agriculture received a similar 1970s treatment. A panel described one agency that used 37 different publication sizes. The proposed fix reduced those formats to four vertical sizes and one horizontal size. Standardisation could make printing cheaper and easier to manage, so a new visual system did not need to begin as a plea for beauty.

The programme distributed an outside design culture through these meetings and critiques. Some agency redesigns used NEA money. Others were paid for by the agencies themselves, which then hired private design firms. Edwards had assumed that agency staff produced the graphics standards manuals. The contracts brought in designers from outside instead.

Richard Danne, who designed the NASA worm, described his process on a NASA podcast. NASA knew it had a problem and wanted a document style manual that everyone could use. Danne says the work followed practices already common in corporate identity design. Massimo Vignelli’s work for the National Park Service went further towards a design system and a grid-based manifesto. These cases show the programme’s reach, although they also show its dependence on individual firms and individual commissions.

A style without a new design system

Edwards calls the results scattershot. The programme brought a short burst of outside energy into federal design. It did not create a strong central process that could make every agency use the same principles after the designers and conventions had moved on.

He compares the programme to a workplace or school that invites a visiting speaker to discuss sculpting or a trip to Tibet. The talk might start new ideas, while the organisation itself remains unchanged. The federal government invited outside designers to improve particular parts of its appearance. It left the underlying design system largely as it was.

That weakness became visible after the programme ended in 1981. The EPA abandoned its new logo during the Reagan era and returned to the daisy. Edwards connects the decision to administrator Anne Gorsuch’s reported demand to have the old mark back. NASA dropped the worm in 1992 after inconsistent use and returned to the meatball. In 2020, NASA brought the worm back as a secondary logo, which gives it a second life as a retro object rather than a complete replacement for the later identity.

The manual and the institution

The familiar manuals can make the federal government look unusually organised, competent, and stylish. Edwards’s account gives them a less flattering origin. A small infusion of money, the design fashion of the period, and a few people with enough authority to commission good work produced remarkable cultural objects. The programme lacked a bureaucracy with the power to keep those objects in force.

The result is a useful distinction between a design intervention and a design institution. A manual can specify a logo, a grid, and a set of applications. The organisation still needs a process that makes those rules survive changes in leadership, budgets, procurement, and everyday use. The federal programme supplied the first part for a while. Its disappearance exposed the missing second part.

The worm’s return works because the identity had first vanished. Its current appeal depends on the gap between the 1970s manual and the years in which NASA used the meatball. The federal government can revisit the object as history because the system that once supported it no longer controls the whole identity.

Limits

The note follows Edwards’s reconstruction of the Federal Graphics Improvement Program from the video, its description, and the source list he provides. The video names the memo, newsletters, conventions, agency redesigns, and later logo changes, while it gives limited citations during the narration. The claim that the programme failed because it brought in money and outside expertise without changing federal design administration is Edwards’s interpretation of those cases.

Edwards also declines to judge the quality of every design produced by the programme. The examples support a history of visual change and institutional weakness. They do not, on their own, establish a complete account of federal design policy or explain every agency’s decision to keep, alter, or abandon its identity.

Further reading / references

• The Design Necessity, the book Edwards describes as a major source for the Federal Graphics Improvement Program and the case for design in government.
• Why Arts Mattered to Nixon, the Nixon Foundation’s reproduction of Leonard Garment’s memo.
• The New York Times introduction to the Federal Graphics Improvement Program.
• NASA’s podcast on the NASA worm, including Richard Danne’s account of the identity work.
• The Standards Manual, the publisher associated with the reissued federal graphics standards manuals.
• The US Web Design System, the current federal design-system reference linked in the video’s description.
• The full Nixon Tapes conversation between Leonard Garment and Richard Nixon.