Artists might scoff at rules or boundaries, but any graphic designer worth their Retina display knows how to thrive in them. Whether it’s fonts or a color palette, graphic designers flex their creativity working with a pre-existing toolset and parameters known in the industry as a standard manual. The aptly named Brooklyn-based publisher, Standards Manual, celebrates tomes of classic design identities from the days before InDesign and mobile-optimized fonts. Founders and Pentagram-alumni Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed’s latest release explores the graphic identity of the Environmental Protection Agency.
How do you approach a new project?
Jesse Reed: Up until the EPA book, most of our titles have been reissues of standards manuals we wanted to archive and we were interested in the historical significance they have so there wasn’t much of us designing anything. It was just making a well-produced archive of that document.
At that time, the EPA was in the news for being under attack, not that they still aren’t, but their identity was especially relevant and included a lot of the program that had never been seen before. There are color systems and pattern systems I had never seen before, so from a designer’s perspective, it was eye-opening.
Hamish Smyth: It’s also a really cool manual. That was certainly part of it as well. [Laughs]
A lot of the manuals come from the ’60s and ’70s. Why?
HS: These manuals didn’t really exist until the late 1950s. That was when corporate design as a discipline really took off. The ones we have chosen all happen to be from the ’70s, which I think was probably the golden era of these manuals. In the ’90s, they really started going downhill.
JR: Which was because of computers to be honest. It was a new tool that people didn’t fully understand and they were experimenting and doing really bad things.
What lessons can a designer take away from the series?
JR: There are a ton. One is being very intentional. All of these manuals made very rationalized and intentional decisions to get through the design process and not have to rethink the same questions over and over again. You have to be very detailed and specific in how a logo can be applied to everything from a letterhead to a truck in a very micro to macro scale.
HS: It’s thinking in systems. Anyone can create a cool logo, but thinking in systems is difficult and these books really help people think that way.
A lot of these iconic design manuals come from bureaucratic agencies, which seems counterintuitive.
HS: It all came from the National Endowment for the Arts during the Nixon administration. They created the Federal Graphics Improvement Program. There was a committee with designers on it and they were saying how far behind Europe the U.S. was in terms of design. NASA was the first agency they targeted to redesign their graphics program. It previously had a high school newspaper-style cut and paste aesthetic. It did not look like a space agency.
One really cool thing about the NASA logo: that worm logo is on the Voyager spacecraft. It’s the furthest man-made object from Earth right now. It’s in interstellar space, so if anything ever finds that spacecraft, they’re going to see that logo first.
Is the EPA manual more relevant given the current administration’s treatment of the agency?
HS: It has a nice feeling of a time when these agencies were more respected. I guess it depends on which side of the political spectrum you’re on, but it feels like the EPA is being gutted. The guy running it used to lobby against it.
JR: This design program was supposed to elevate the EPA as something you should take seriously and we still should, if not more so given that the Earth is crumbling. The manuals showed respect for the agency and its work, and now there’s a lack of respect unfortunately. Hopefully these manuals will remind someone, somewhere, of that.
Images courtesy of Standards Manual.
This article was originally published in RANGE Magazine Issue Eight.