How Good Design Helped the U.S. National Parks Flourish

“It was like every person who was designing one of these early brochures or maps had their own interpretation of what that cover should look like.”

By Liz Stinson

Yellowstone National Park spans 3,472 square miles, cutting across Wyoming and bits of Montana and Idaho. All told, it takes up more land than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. And yet, for the first 30 years of its existence, the park didn’t have an official map.

Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the United States’ first national park, but it wasn’t until 1912 that it had a brochure to document its natural wonders. The guide, a sepia-toned stack of paper, outlined rules, regulations, and sights in charts, tables, and blocks of text. By today’s standards, the brochure would never make it to the printer, but it was an important first step in what would become a long history of bold and experimental graphic design coming out of the National Parks Service (NPS).

Since those early days, the NPS has expanded to include 61 parks. Over the years, each of those parks developed its own visual style that morphed and shifted with the changing trends in graphic design. Now, a new book, Parks, charts the evolution of the…