It’s been 50 years since NASA unveiled a futuristic, curvilinear wordmark that would come to be known as the Worm. It revolved around “one stroke letters suggesting technology, propulsion, lift”, in the words of Richard Danne, who designed it along with the late Bruce Blackburn in 1974 as part of NASA’s Federal Design Improvement Program. The logotype was officially introduced in 1975, appearing in NASA’s groundbreaking Graphics Standards Manual steered by Danne and Blackburn that year.

The Worm was retired as the brand’s primary identifier in 1992, when an earlier design – James Modarelli’s 1959 ‘Meatball’ insignia – was brought back to the fore. To the delight of many space design enthusiasts though, the Worm was reinstated as a secondary design in 2020, first appearing on the side of the Falcon 9 rocket. Despite its hiatus, it has remained firmly embedded in culture and design. Over time, it has appeared directly, in NASA’s many merch and streetwear collaborations, and indirectly, in the curving letterforms and ligatures of Asus, Sega and CNN’s wordmarks. “Now today, you see this copy over and over and over,” Danne himself has said. “In my lectures I do a thing on copycat culture. You know, thousands of marks are out there. They imitate this.”