Parks: United States National Park Service Maps

A national park brochure is the kind of thing you pick up at a visitor centre, glance at once and leave in the glovebox. Stack a century of them in date order and something else happens.

Parks, published by Standards Manual, runs to 384 pages and reproduces over 300 national park maps, brochures and pieces of ephemera from photographer Brian Kelley's collection, sequenced chronologically so a hundred years of American graphic design goes past as you turn. The hinge in that sequence falls in 1977. Vincent Gleason, the Park Service's Director of Publications, needed a cheaper way to keep every park stocked with printed material, and hired Massimo Vignelli to work one out.

Vignelli's answer was the Unigrid: a single panel of 4 by 8.25 inches, sized to the fold lines, combining one or two across and repeating up to six times down. That yields a handful of brochure sizes that all cut cleanly from a standard 25 by 38 inch sheet of 70 pound dull coated text. A black band and a white Helvetica title sit on the front of each. The system took a Presidential Award for Design Excellence in 1984.

Before it, the brochures ran to whatever their decade liked: black and white photography, bold Pop graphics, sleek modernist arrangements. Watching that variety compress into one grid is the argument the book makes without ever writing it down, helped by stochastic screen printing that lays ink in irregular dots and holds the texture of the originals. Edited by Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, with an essay by Lyz Nagan-Powell. Vignelli himself called the parks work perhaps his favourite project in a 2007 book, on the grounds that it had reached more people than anything else he drew.