Images courtesy of Standards Manual
Created with
These photographs were a part of the DOCUMERICA (1971—1977) series created by the Environmental Protection Agency to bring attention to the era's
environmental problems.
Explore Walden Pond
Watch Richard Nixon deliver a 1972 speech on the importance of the EPA.
Chermayeff & Geismar have created
some of the most iconic identities of
our time—including NBC, Xerox,
and National Geographic
Explore the 1970 New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual
or
the 1975 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics Standards Manual
Watch how graphic designers created layouts before the introduction
of Photoshop and other
digital publishing tools
HEADPHONES RECOMMENDED
For two years, he lived apart from the comforts of urban life, trading a busy sidewalk for a mountain trail, the smog of factories for the stinging fragrance of a pine forest. It was a spartan life and one not without its own hardships. But it changed him. "Heaven," he said, "is under our feet as well as over our heads."
For 792 days, Henry David Thoreau lived in a tiny cabin he built near Walden Pond in the quiet countryside of Massachusetts.
"The real brilliance
of the EPA graphics standard is that it actually allowed expression within
a strict foundation.”
40 years after it was released, Reed and Smyth have partnered with Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv to reproduce the 1977 EPA Graphic Standards Manual as a hardcover book and will be selling it on Kickstarter through May 26th, 2017.
So what can today’s laptop-wielding digital designers take away from a project like this?
“For young designers, this system shows that considered and restrained design can still be beautiful,” says Smyth. “It doesn’t have to be cutting edge. It doesn’t need to have avant-garde typography and layout. You can still do really meaningful, important work that is beautiful while being minimal and restrained.”
“Although we have computers available to us today, it doesn’t necessarily mean that modern graphic designers could quickly recreate a logical system like this,” says Reed. “The execution went above and beyond the tools used to create it. Ultimately, it was the thinking and consideration that went into differentiating programs within the same consistent and flexible visual language.
“But what’s interesting, and what younger designers—students even—need to know, is that all this stuff was done manually, without a computer as a tool, and that was really, really difficult. You were printing with nine different colors, spot colors, and then you had a pattern for each one, laying out the type by hand. They had to be very intentional, and decisive, about what each piece of material was going to look like, and it took a lot of time. There was much more care and thought put into how these different programs were going to be interpreted nationally by different designers. You couldn’t just send a job request and expect somebody to whip it up in 20 minutes.”
The resulting 1977 US Environmental Protection Agency Graphic Standard System manual was a masterclass exercise in creating a flexible brand identity. It was also a masterclass exercise in what happens when refined logic meets design brilliance. In the end, we're all better because of it.
Like the 1970 New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual and the 1975 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics Standards Manual before it, the updated Environmental Protection Agency identity system would slowly become dismantled over the following decades as effective design continued to—sadly—lose its significance as a role in government operations.
Still, the significance of the identity system overhaul is just as true today as it was when it was launched in 1977.
“Today we have computers, and we can do this kind of stuff really, really quickly. We kind of don’t think about it, and it’s almost taken for granted,” says Reed.
“The brilliance of this system was in its flexibility—especially for something created in 1977,” explains Smyth.
“What you could do, for instance, was take the Radiation Department, which was branded with ‘toxic red,’ and take a corresponding abstract pattern to symbolize a particular office within that division. This would become the foundation for building out branded collateral for this specific subset of the agency. From there, you could combine the color and pattern with images and copy, to create an informative brochure or other printed materials. As wide as the agency was, so long as the colors and patterns were used, everything still looked as though it was a part of a singular system—which, at the time, was a very difficult thing to do because of the complexities. For a government office, this was very expressive and functional graphic design.”
The designers then expanded the concepts of this central mark into a larger identity system, with the nine most critical categories that the EPA was dealing with, including toxic substances, radiation, and water. To add flexibility to the various sub-brands of each category, they assigned a color and an identification pattern to each of the programs. By combining the various colors and patterns, the designers—and ultimately the EPA—could create a unique identity for each of the various sub-branches of the agency, while still containing them within a unified and logical system. Additionally, the system needed to be reproduced cheaply and consistently, by hand, by a wide network of graphic artists across the United States.
“It obviously had a foundation where it came from with the original seal design, but Geissbuhler simplified it by bringing it to just the core elements of the environment. So if you look at that mark just by itself, it has the sun in the center, it has water, and then it has the petals from the flower representing nature, and then in its entirety, it’s the globe, explains Reed. “It’s a beautiful example of symbolism and what this organization is all about in one very simple graphic mark.”
With support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Federal Graphics Improvement Program—the same program that helped fund the creation of the NASA worm logo and graphic identity system in 1975—Chermayeff & Geismar were given the go-ahead to advance the graphical integrity of the agency with an updated graphic standards guide, to help it more efficiently carry out its goal of “working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people.”
Armed with an audit of the existing identity system, the design team at Chermayeff & Geismar, led by design director Steff Geissbuhler, began by revising the agency’s existing logo, known as the Daisy.
“The EPA logo is actually a pretty ingenious mark,” explains graphic designer Jesse Reed. Previously an Associate Partner at the famed NYC design agency, Pentagram, Reed and fellow graphic designer, Hamish Smyth, established Standards Manual, an independent publishing agency, in 2014, to preserve lost artifacts of design history, and make them available to future generations.
Among other issues, the agency was spending millions of dollars on informational brochures without color, type, size, or messaging consistency. Ultimately, the need for a comprehensive new visual system wasn’t just about design for design’s sake—it was also critical for the very functioning of the nationwide agency. To find a solution, the EPA brought in one of the best design agencies of the time. Its task: to rethink how a government agency should look, be, and organize itself.
Founded in 1957 by designers Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, the agency, Chermayeff & Geismar, began as a collaborative for viewing business problems through a modernist lens and solving them with design thinking. During their first two decades in business, the designers and their staff created identities for a wide range of companies and organizations, including Chase Manhattan Bank to Mobil Oil. It was the opportunity to consolidate an efficient graphics system for the EPA, however, which would prove to be one of their most iconic projects.
But the idyllic Utopian dream of living amid boundless natural resources and breathing clean air soon came under threat. The 20th century saw the next great leap of industrialization, with its factories, roads and rails, and its legacy of pollution and poisons. It was the start of a new era, in which human beings relentlessly depleted natural resources, to the point of killing the very environment that supported them. Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States of America, was to be instrumental in containing the impact that human beings were having on the planet.
On January 1, 1970, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, which many referred to as the “environmental Magna Carta.” Just 20 days later, in his State of the Union address, Nixon made a powerful statement: “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country.” And, given the renewed national interest in preserving America’s natural environment, Nixon proposed that all environmental responsibilities of the federal government be consolidated into a single agency—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
From its inception, the mission of the EPA was clear: to protect human health and preserve the environment—from the highest mountains to the lowest valleys—for all Americans. But to organize hundreds of federal and state offices—each with different missions and causes—as a unified entity proved to be anything but easy.
HELPED SAVE
THE ENVIRONMENT
GRAPHIC DESIGN
HOW
By Simon Martin
The Story Behind the 1977 US Environmental Protection Agency Graphic Standards Manual
