NSF Logo PNG
The National Science Foundation, or NSF, is the largest independent agency of the U.S. Government responsible for advancing science and technology in the country. Established in 1950 by the U.S. Congress, the Foundation supports collaborative research between universities and private companies, international scientific and technical programs, and education at all levels.
Meaning and history
So, the National Science Foundation is a federal agency that supports and funds research and education initiatives in science, technology, engineering, and math. The agency was created by the U.S. Congress to advance scientific progress in the country. And since its founding, in 1950, NSF has done an excellent job of fulfilling its original mission by funding research centers and individual researchers through grants.
NSF, which today has an annual budget of more than $8 billion, awards about a thousand temporary grants per year to fund certain research proposals that have been rated by the peer-review system as the most promising.
The National Science Foundation supports National Research Centers, research centers, expeditions, and oceanographic vessels. The Foundation is also very involved in university research and in promoting U.S. representatives in international scientific and technical programs.
The organizational structure of the NSF consists of a director, who is appointed by the President of the United States with the consent of Congress for a six-year term, and a 24-member National Science Board (NSB) of distinguished individuals who meet six times a year to set the foundation’s major policies.
In terms of visual identity, the National Science Foundation follows all the rules of the governmental institution’s logo design. The badge of the NSF looks laconic, strong, and at the same time memorable and pretty vivid.
1950 – 1972
The original logo was designed for the NSF in 1950 and stayed with the organization for the first decade of its history. It was a badge, based on the national symbolism of the United States, with the contoured image of a bald eagle placed above a classy crest and surrounded by a circular frame made of uppercase lettering with the full name of the organization.
1972 – 2005
The redesign of 1972 has introduced a more individual approach to the logo concept of the National Science Foundation. Now it was a circular composition with the lowercase NSF abbreviation written in a cool designer typeface on the white roundel, enclosed into a wide frame made of connected lines with praxis facing outside. The connection of the lines looked like a molecular pattern.
1984 – 1999
The version, used by the National Science Foundation from the middle of the 1980s has borrowed the geometry of the previous version but modified the concept. Now the central piece of the composition was a blue and green globe enclosed into the golden frame, which fully repeated the idea of the logo from the 1970s. The full name of the foundation was written around the emblem in the sea-green capitals of a modern sans-serif typeface with solid dots in the same hue separating the words from each other.
1999 – 2009
In 1999 the logo was redrawn in a three-dimensional style, with the globe getting voluminous and the full name of the organization written around the perimeter replaced by a bold white abbreviation, written across the globe in a bold serif font. The frame has kept its shape yet gained gradients shades of gold, which made the whole composition more vivid and bright.
2009 – Today
The redesign of 2009 has enlarged the globe part of the National Science Foundation badge, reducing the width of the golden frame. The abbreviation was also enlarged, plus the white serif capitals gained a delicate blue outline, which added confidence and distinction to the whole badge.
Font and color
The bold white lettering from the primary logo of the National Science Foundation is set in a classy and clean serif typeface, which looks pretty close to such commercial fonts as Baskerville Display PT Bold or Nimbus Roman No 9, with some minor modifications of the characters’ contours.
As for the color palette of the NSF visual identity, it is based on the combination of blue and green, which represent our planet, gold, which adds a sense of expertise and professionalism, and white, which symbolizes transparency and reliability of the organization.
