Bruce Blackburn, Designer of NASA Worm Logo, Has Died | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Blackburn, Designer of NASA Worm Logo, Has Died

nytimes.com

145 pointsNaOH34 comments

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!

https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics-standards...

https://standardsmanual.com/products/the-worm

https://standardsmanual.com/products/american-revolution-bic...

These are great! Thanks.

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 people holding the purse strings are old men with an affinity for stodgy nostalgia. Know your customer.

And the stogy old men of present grew up in the worm era so worm it is.

As someone who grew up with the meatball, I can’t fathom why they went back to the worm.

It’s all 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.

Looks like it may be worming its way back into favour: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-worm-is-back/

The worm seems to break the mobile view. There's probably some sort of comment on the incompatibility of the old and new there.

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.

I really liked this combo of both: https://i.etsystatic.com/17866637/r/il/2e5c26/1862905722/il_...

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.

However, I LOVE that combination of both.

Perfection

I find this strangely futuristic!

I first saw this about 1993 in an military patch maker shop, the man said it was a prototype but unsure how official it was.

> 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.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Goldin

Personally I think the meatball is just as beautiful and timeless, just not in a minimalist "sci-fi" way.

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.

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.

(Because I had to google "nasa meatball logo")

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/symbo...

I went asearching about this. I'm not from the US and basically I'm aware that NASA have a logo.

This: https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/symbo... seems to be the authorative/PR source and it mentions the creator of the Meatball but not the Worm logo. That's probably a simple oversight but a sad one nonetheless.

FWIW I'm a fan of the worm. The meatball thingie is a bit formulaic for my taste.

EDIT: He also created the logo for this: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/18/obituaries/18blac...

I think this is nicely apt:

“They say in life there are moments that are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” Mr. Blackburn said. “And I got two of them.”

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.

> He also created the logo for this: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/18/obituaries/18blac...

What can you say... the man liked worms.

Am i the only one thinking that the worm is looking so much better than the meatball?

This may be a brand new sentence.

Unpopular opinion: I think they both look really dated.

I've always had a soft spot for the JAXA logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAXA

All I see when I look at the JAXA logo is the blue Lockheed Martin star that they've used since the mid 90s, if not earlier.

To be fair, Lockheed's logo is also iconic. So much so that it was used as the logo for Stark industries in Ironman.

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.

The worm is great but I love the meatball. It feels so distinctive and unlike any other well known logo.

Ah yes, the VSVN logo, truly an icon.

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