Why Would a Designer Bother Designing a "Design Standards Manual"? | 100 People With Ideas

Jesse Reed thinks these manuals, with their endless detail on how to apply a design system, are a complete expression of "design thinking" — from before the phrase was worn out.

Every graphic designer knows the visual identity standards manual.

It is a practical, exhaustively detailed rulebook that tells the reader how to use typography, color and typeface to make graphic design for an institution that is consistent and on-spec.

Because it is purely functional, a visual identity standards manual usually reaches only graphic designers and people working in the same field.

Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth see it differently. The two graphic designers handle such reference books every day, and help make them, and they believe a good visual identity standards manual is worth sharing with everyone.

And that is what they have done. On April 24, 2017, under the name of their independent publishing house Standard Manual, Reed and Smyth put their fourth visual identity standards manual on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter — the complete identity system that Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, the American design studio behind the NBC logo, made for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1977.

The book runs 244 pages, including a 10-page horizontal foldout. Its hardcover is made of recycled material, a nod to the manual's environmental subject, and the whole thing is printed in full color. The crowdfunding price was $49 a copy.

Twenty-five days later, the project passed its original goal of $158,000. As of this writing it has raised $162,513, and at least 1,903 backers from around the world, working in all sorts of fields, will receive the manual.

That is not the pair's best crowdfunding result. Set against their other campaigns, the EPA project is in fact the quietest of the three: when Reed and Smyth reissued NASA's famous "worm" logo manual in October 2015, 8,798 backers pledged them nearly $950,000 in six days.

In an interview with QDaily, Jesse Reed called the start of the whole venture "an accident."

In 2013, Reed and Hamish Smyth, a colleague at Pentagram's New York office, happened to notice a red binder in a basement cabinet, buried under old drafts and paperwork. They pulled it out and found they were holding a complete 1970 graphic standards manual for the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA).

At first neither of them thought about republishing it. "At the time we just thought more people should see this book," Reed said in an interview with Design Week. "So we photographed every page and put it on a website we built ourselves. Then our design director Michael Bierut retweeted it, and Pentagram retweeted it too. Suddenly there were millions of views."

It took another year — the New York City Transit Authority became a Pentagram client, the subject came up by chance in a meeting, and the authority said it would be glad to see the book made again — before Reed and Smyth settled on Kickstarter as the way to do it.

"We had always thought a visual identity standards manual would make good publishing material. But a traditional publisher will not take that kind of risk; the audience for this sort of book is too small. Because we had built the website first and proved that such an audience existed, that is what finally set off the first Kickstarter project," Reed said.

Between September 10 and October 11, 2014, 6,718 backers pledged more than $800,000 to the project. Reed and Smyth's original goal for the book had been $100,000.

The platform did more than carry the first project through. It also showed a lot of people that visual identity standards manuals could be published as books at all.

The 2015 NASA project is what really made their name. The system was designed in 1975 by the graphic designers Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn. Its modern, sans-serif, curved bold letterforms earned the NASA logo the nickname "the worm." The letter "A," missing its crossbar, also called up the shape of a rocket's nose.

The design won Danne and Blackburn, whose studio had only just opened, a large commission from NASA, but it did not win over the astronauts and scientists, who had no idea how to use the new mark. Over the next dozen or so years the two designers had to rack their brains to produce a visual identity standards manual more than 90 pages long, explaining to NASA staff in full detail how the system should be applied to everything from a ballpoint pen to a spacecraft. Many graphic designers therefore consider the system a milestone in contemporary graphic design.

Reed calls the NASA manual "the basic example of a 'standard.'" So when people began asking them on Twitter to make the NASA mark again, the two gladly agreed.

Everything after that followed on its own. Once the second Kickstarter project succeeded, the two decided to start an independent publishing company, Standard Manual.

"Crowdfunding put us in touch with a much wider audience than graphic designers. And the format cut out a lot of the risk built into the traditional publishing process. Customers confirm the demand; clear data keeps us from overproducing, keeps us off useless ideas, and helps us track who our customers are — all of which convinced us this is a new publishing model," Reed told QDaily.

The third manual, for the 200th anniversary of American independence, the two published simply because they wanted to, and it is sold only on Standard Manual's own website. It was designed in 1974 by Bruce Blackburn, the same man behind NASA's "worm." In fact, this was the work that won Blackburn the NASA job.

Then came the recent EPA project. By then the first three books had built enough of a reputation that AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, came to Reed and Smyth directly, inviting them to make a manual together with Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, which was celebrating its 60th anniversary.

"We looked through all sorts of standards manuals in CGH's office, from Knoll to NBC — arguably the finest collection of corporate identity manuals in North America. But EPA was special. We think it is a system most designers have never seen. And given the current political climate, and the real chance that the EPA loses its government funding, we felt that design work done for a federal program or any public agency is worth keeping by people in the field," Reed said.

The first book came out of a chance find, the second out of calls from people online, the third out of their own taste, the fourth out of a commercial partnership. In Reed's words, this has been a matter of "slowly turning a hobby into a business."

The one thing that has not changed is that both men are graphic designers all the way through. That shows first in how each book is made and packaged. Both are experienced designers — at Pentagram's New York office they worked on Mastercard's brand refresh, the visual identity for Hillary Clinton's campaign, and New York City's pedestrian map system, among other major projects — so making a beautiful printed object is no great difficulty for them.

From the first book on, every Standard Manual interior has been printed in Italy. Visual identity manuals demand more color accuracy than ordinary printing, and the original manuals have yellowed with age and poor storage, so the two have spent enormous amounts of time scanning and correcting color to get a new edition as close to the original as possible.

At the front of every manual, Reed and Smyth also add one or two essays by graphic designers, or other material related to the project. For the NYCTA manual, Michael Bierut — head of Pentagram's New York office and a design educator — wrote the foreword. For the NASA volume, the two included images of the original design proposal from Danne & Blackburn.

These small editorial touches carry Standard Manual's books past the manual's original definition as a mere "reference book," closer to an illustrated record of graphic design standards in one period of American history.

Reed and Smyth have one hope for Standard Manual: that by publishing a series of important visual identity standards manuals they can "preserve and spread the various artistic forms graphic design has taken through history."

"These manuals show a kind of 'design thinking,' from before 'design thinking' became a cool word," Reed said. "Even the spacing between individual letters was specified with great care. Nothing was left out, and the point was to make design as efficient as possible. Even a part-time designer could find any design requirement in there immediately."

That kind of care belongs to its period. Forty-odd years ago, people had no clear rules for using a grid and no working theory of the color palette, so they leaned much more heavily on the designer's work; clients, for their part, lived in constant fear of producing some extension of the design that broke the rules.

Design keeps throwing up the same pattern: young designers like to talk about creativity, while experienced designers prefer to talk about rules. Reed is one of the advocates of "rules." It shows in the name of the studio he and Smyth recently opened — they called it Order.

"We think order stands for good design. Classification and hierarchy and everything attached to them make up a design system — that is our design philosophy, everything is connected," Reed said in an interview with Fastcodesign.com when Order's office opened.

Reed argues that design — graphic design, mainly, in this discussion — is not some "trend" on social media or Pinterest but a complete method of its own. People have to be taught properly: they have to study and practice the skills and the ways of thinking before they can make genuinely good work.

The standards manual is the "rules" themselves, and it spells out what Reed and Smyth believe. But as media forms change, fewer and fewer design firms will commit to a thick, dictionary-like manual of application rules. Companies want their visual identity to be more flexible, more changeable, even open to being "hacked" by young people at any moment. It is hard now to sum up every application rule of a visual identity system in one fixed book.

New things appear and iterate every day. In a visual environment built by dizzying multimedia technology, does this traditional way of thinking about design and its rules still affect designers?

Reed thinks it does.

"Given the way we work now, the whole set of principles still applies, even as visual display terminals grow more and more varied," he said. "I believe anyone studying design needs to understand these principles first before they can change design at all."

Cover image and unattributed images from: Standard Manual