Gallery: NASA Needs to Adopt This Cool New Logo
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The Russians were NASA's chief rival during the space race, so it's ironic that it took a young Russian named Max Lapteff to design a smart, speculative rebranding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration logo.
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This circular theme is embodied as an arc that cuts the letters off from the baseline, suggesting the curvature of a planet.
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The chunky futuristic font of the "worm" logo, mercifully grounded in 1992, is replaced with a lighter typeface that preserves some of the original hallmarks, like the missing crossbars in the "A's."
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The new logo generalizes NASA's mission in a way the current insignia doesn't.
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Lapteff designed a style guide that allows the floating orb to be replaced with graphics for specific missions, like a red circle for a mission to Mars or an asteroid for an *Armageddon*-style adventure.
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Where you might find a registration mark on a corporate trademark, Lapteff placed a solid circle.
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Paired with the negative space below, it suggests an endless cosmos to be explored.
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Lapteff considered the practicalities of applying the new mark across NASA's myriad applications.
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The logo's simple lines help it scale from a logo on a tote bag to the livery on NASA's "Vomit Comet," its zero-G simulation plane.
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Lapteff's logo concept makes NASA feel like an organization that can boldly go where no one has gone before.
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The logo is minimal, but is recognizable even when shrunk to relatively small sizes.
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And remains coherent when blown up and wrapped around the curved fuselage of a plane.
