Flashback to a time when government reports were works of art

Government reports tend to make for less-than-scintillating reading. That’s the nature of the beast. Data can be dry. But for the better part of the 20th century, the covers of these reports were works of art.

“Transporting Watermelons in Bulk and Bins by Truck,” a 1982 report for the Department of Agriculture, features an illustration of a semi-truck. But instead of hauling a trailer, the cargo is one gigantic watermelon, with an adorable tail on the end. A 1964 annual report for the Missouri State Highway Commission titled “A Report of Highway Death in Missouri” appears to be inspired by the minimalist, geometric movie posters created by Saul Bass in the ’50s and ’60s. Against a black background, the red lettering of the title is all but crushing a prone human form.

Rachel Cole is the curator at the Northwestern University Transportation Library and she has been scanning these report covers and then posting them in an ever-expanding Bluesky thread as a way to interest the general public in the library’s catalog. Founded in 1958, the transportation library is located within Northwestern’s main library and is open to the public, housing over 500,000 volumes related to all modes of transportation.

Guy Villa, a graphic designer and professor at Columbia College Chicago, notes that these covers were about trying to humanize dense information. He points to the 1964 Missouri report as a brave example of using post-modern typography and stark imagery to engage readers on serious topics.

However, this trend of creativity shifted around 2012. As reports moved from hard copies to PDFs, budgets tightened and the expectation for "fast and cheap" grew. This led to the rise of clip art, stock photos, and generative AI. Villa suggests there is now a sense that great design isn't needed because people scroll past title pages on digital devices. Yet, as seen in a 1972 report on transportation noise, intentional design choices—like thin white lines emanating from vehicles to represent sound—provide a level of meaning and purpose that AI-generated images cannot replicate.