Creating the National Park Service Visual Identity

Join us for a presentation followed by a live discussion and your chance to ask questions to our expert panel.
The arrowhead, the flat-brimmed hat, and certain architectural styles carried the day for the National Park Service (NPS) visual identity for many years. See how this early identity grew during the 20th century. Witness the beginnings of the now-iconic black banner and park sign system and how they are used today. What other visual clues tell visitors they are in a National Park unit?
Explore these questions and ask your own during this presentation about the advantages and challenges of transforming a visual identity into a strong, holistic brand. It’s one of the many communications projects that the Harpers Ferry Center for Media Services is developing to help connect people with the National Park Service and its public treasures in the 21st century.
About the presenter:
Greg Aylsworth is a designer at the NPS’ Harpers Ferry Center and a member of the NPS Brand Management Team and Arrowhead Committee. He has over 25 years of communications experience with a specialization in brand identity strategy and design. Prior to joining NPS, he was founder and principal creative of the consultancy, Octoblend, and also served as senior designer and a brand leader for The Ohio State University Department of Athletics.
About the panelists:
Phil Musselwhite
Phil Musselwhite retired from the NPS in 2017, after serving 43 years in various capacities at HFC. He began as a staff designer in Publications and later moved to Exhibits where he eventually became Assistant Division Chief. Later he served as Chief of the Division of Wayside Exhibits, and creator and founding manager of the NPS Sign Program and the Office of NPS Identity. Phil is the father of four children and currently lives in North Carolina with his wife Dasha and son Max.
Betsy Ehrlich
Betsy Ehrlich recently moved into the role of Publications Production Manager at HFC. She has also served in a variety of other roles at HFC; designer for publications, exhibits, and waysides; and as an instructor for several courses in NPS publications and interpretive media. In each of these roles, she has been involved with the development and implementation of NPS identity.
About the Moderator:
Brendan Bray
Brendan Bray is the Director of the National Park Service's Harpers Ferry Center for Media Services (HFC), which is committed to enhancing the visitor experience in national parks through the use of relevant, compelling media. Prior to his arrival at the NPS in 2018, Brendan served as Chief Operating Officer for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at NOAA, served as Chief of Staff for NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, and was a member of the U.S. government's scientific support team during emergency response and natural resource damage assessment phases of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
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Thank you for making this publicly available!
I’m not a NPS employee or volunteer, but having grown up in the northern Shenandoah Valley, the Shenandoah National Park, Harper’s Ferry, and the work of the NPS and USFS are very dear to me.
I’ve always loved to unique aesthetic of the signage, architecture, and uniforms, associated with the NPS; and especially the design philosophy of taking from, and blending into, natural surroundings rather than contrasting with them. I love that NPS treats natural wonders as something to be enjoyed in their own right, rather than augmented or subjectively improved on.
I really appreciate the work you all are doing to craft a kind of brand identity for the NPS, but I’m concerned when I hear it described with, or compared to, other major communications organizations like Disney or the NFL.
I desperately implore you not to think of branding for the NPS in short-term marketability, which is what many brands do, in an effort maintain fleeting relevance with a constantly changing society. The arrowhead logo, the Park Ranger uniforms, the NPS rustic architecture, the fonts, the black banner, the things that scream “National Park Service” the second you look at them, are themselves relics worth preserving. The NPS, and its branding, are uniquely historical in their own right. They reflect the time, people, and philosophy, that created them.
That’s not to say changes shouldn’t ever be made; but when changes are made, they should be mission oriented. Frutiger is a perfect example. It was a stylistic change that lost some of the historic flavor of the Clarendon typeface, but did so for the purpose of better performing Clarendon’s mission of legibility and recognizability as a distinctly NPS stylistic element .
There’s always a risk of individuals within an organization wanting to use their position, and the organization’s resources, to “leave their mark” in the organization itself. It’s the same compulsion for personal legacy that drove visitors the vandalize park property, which resulted in the NPS being formed in the first place. Please be careful to treat your positions in brand identity as stewards of a valuable relic, rather than artists tasked with reimagining the NPS with a personal flare.
I have no doubt that those managing the NPS brand have the talent to create beautiful work, but please love the NPS enough to protect it, rather than view it as a canvas.