NI Brand Guidelines: The Austin Garage Start-Up Behind LabVIEW, Now Part of Emerson

Three engineers, a garage and a computer interface.

NI began in Austin, Texas, in 1976. English Wikipedia says its three founders, James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin, had worked together in the early 1970s at the University of Texas at Austin’s Applied Research Laboratories, where a project for the US Navy had them using new computer technology to collect and analyse data. The company’s own history puts the start in Truchard’s garage, where, it says, the idea was “to connect a test instrument to a computer.”

The name took some finding. English Wikipedia says the founders first tried names such as Longhorn Instruments and Texas Digital, whose trademarks were rejected, before settling on National Instruments. Their first product was an interface that linked laboratory instruments to a PDP-11 minicomputer over the GPIB bus, and the first sale went to Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio. The three kept their university jobs until 1980, when they moved to the company full time.

In 1983 the company made its first GPIB board for IBM personal computers. Working with student researchers on the new Apple Macintosh, Kodosky developed a way of programming by drawing: engineers “wire” icons together on screen rather than typing lines of code. The result, LabVIEW, was released for the Macintosh in 1986, English Wikipedia says, and later for Windows and Unix machines in 1992. The company opened its first office abroad, in Tokyo, in 1987.

Virtual instruments, modular hardware.

NI’s identity rests on a simple idea: that much of a test bench can live in software running on a computer, with modular hardware doing the measuring. English Wikipedia describes the company as a maker of automated test equipment and “virtual instrumentation” software, and its range follows that pattern. Alongside LabVIEW sit TestStand, for sequencing production tests, VeriStand for real-time testing and DIAdem for managing data; the company’s website today also lists FlexLogger, InstrumentStudio, SystemLink and OptimalPlus.

On the hardware side, the PXI platform, a modular instrument standard built on CompactPCI that NI introduced in the late 1990s, holds plug-in oscilloscopes, signal generators, switches and power supplies in a single chassis. CompactDAQ gathers data from sensors over USB and Ethernet, and CompactRIO is an FPGA-based controller for industrial use. English Wikipedia notes that the roboRIO controller is the standard used in the FIRST Robotics Competition, which brings the company’s hardware into school robotics teams.

Software for designing circuits came by acquisition. In 2005 NI bought Electronics Workbench, a business that had grown from a Toronto company and a Dutch circuit-board software maker, and with it Multisim and Ultiboard, English Wikipedia says. The same year it bought Measurement Computing, a maker of data-acquisition products, and in January 2013 it bought Digilent, which sells test and development boards to universities. Later purchases included monoDrive, announced in May 2021, for driver-assistance simulation, and the automotive business of Heinzinger, completed in March 2022.

The company grew with its Austin campus. It went public on Nasdaq in 1995, with more than 300 current and former employees holding stock, according to English Wikipedia, and opened a new campus on North Mopac in northern Austin in 1998. Since 1995 it has held an annual developer conference, NIWeek, at the Austin Convention Center. Production moved largely abroad in the 2000s: English Wikipedia says the company opened a manufacturing plant in Debrecen, Hungary, and makes most of its products there.

Design and documentation.

Test and measurement companies sell instruments that most people never see, and their marketing is built around the screen. Product pages and brochures tend to lead with an oscilloscope display: a dark background, a fine grid of divisions and bright traces in yellow, cyan, magenta and green, each colour standing for a separate channel. The trace is the product’s face, so photographs are often cropped tight on the display rather than on the case around it.

The second familiar image is the laboratory. Signal and spectrum analysers, generators and power supplies appear stacked in racks or lined up on a bench, cables looping between front panels of knobs, soft keys and connectors. Engineers are shown probing a circuit board with a fine tip, reading a waveform while the device under test sits under a lamp or a magnifier. The tone is calm and technical, with product names and model numbers set in plain sans type.

Further along the chain, the pictures move into the factory. Semiconductor test makers show automated chip testers and handlers in clean production areas, staff in protective suits, and wafer probe cards photographed under magnification, where rows of needle-like contacts meet the pads of a chip. Network and wireless test companies favour antennas, fibre spools, base stations and phones in shielded boxes.

The category also meets its customers in person. Trade shows such as electronica in Munich, DesignCon in Santa Clara and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are where new instruments are launched and demonstrated live, so stand design, demo screens and printed data sheets carry much of each brand’s visual identity. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

From National Instruments to an Emerson business.

The shorter name came first. On 16 June 2020 the company announced that it would be known as NI, English Wikipedia says, though the legal name in the website’s copyright line is still National Instruments Corporation.

Independence ended three years later. English Wikipedia says that after months of talks the industrial group Emerson made a hostile bid in early 2023, appealing directly to shareholders, and that NI agreed to the purchase in April 2023. On 11 October 2023 Emerson announced from St. Louis that it had closed the acquisition. Its release said NI would become a new reported segment called Test & Measurement, part of Emerson’s Software and Control group, that the business would stay headquartered in Austin, and that NI operated in more than 40 countries serving about 35,000 customers. Ritu Favre, who had joined NI in 2019, was named to lead the new segment. NI’s shares stopped trading on Nasdaq when the deal closed.

The brand has kept its own name and website since. NI’s site today carries the line “NI is now part of Emerson” and describes the business as Emerson’s Test & Measurement business group, focused on what it calls “software-connected automated T&M systems.” Its products are sold across semiconductor and electronics, transportation, aerospace and defence, and academic research, the company says.

For a design guide, NI shows how a test company can build its identity around software and a way of working rather than around a single front panel. Compare Keysight, another American test maker with a long engineering lineage, and Tektronix. For this guide we use a deep green, a lighter leaf green and pale lab paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NI’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.