Objects in Space

About This Project

Vacation Poster

Layout Design, Digital Image Manipulation

The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design

Sketches

A lapse in creative judgement, and a misunderstanding of the requirements for what royalty-free meant, led me astray in my initial ideations. I envisioned a vacation to the titular space station of the television show Stark Trek Deep Space Nine. While I immediately had to abandon the specifics, I was still able to cling to general aspects of this idea.

Digital Draft

I believe my thinking here was that the hyper-wealthy astronauts were experiencing a combination of awe and dread. So much so that no one has noticed the serving of the beach ball. I felt this added another layer to the joke. While that may have been true, the astronauts all facing away and standing upright and unmoving limited the energy of the piece. Back to the drawing board.

Campaign

Do you need a book marked? Billionaires in space is a book mark! Do you need to stare into the gaping maw of oblivion on your commute to work! Try our Billboard!

In the latter half of 2021 I was completing my first full year as a graphic design student. I was taking a raster design class, where I was tasked with creating a fantastical vacation poster. It was the sort of project that saw the evocation of such locals as Atlantis on a regular basis. But, being a child of the Rocket City, my eyes turned toward the stars.

Revised Sketch

In the halcyon pre-pandemic days of 2019 sciencetists achieved a wonder of Radio Astronomy and raw computational power. M87 became the first black hole to be visualized. It was a stunning achievement, that proved that a black hole looked exactly like it had been envisioned for so many decades. Maybe not the most awe-inspiring statement, but an important one scientifically speaking. Importantly, for my purposes, it gave me a new giant space hole to work with.

I eventually hit upon an idea that combined my love of science, social commentary, and my strange sense of humor. This being the time of billionaires using their incomprehensible levels of wealth to stave off the ennui brought about by the escalating requirements necessary to get their emotional dial to move even the slightest, I thought “why not launch them further into space?”. And so the “Visit M87” poster became the apotheosis of these myriad fever dreams.

Process

Kusanagi is a font with very specific applications. It is blocky, but at the same time, it has sharp points. The E is just three horizontal lines. Finally, it lacks lowercase letters. It is not an every-project font. But for two of my projects, it was a great fit.

Kusanagi has a sci-fi or even cyberpunk look. It also shares characteristics similar to the NASA logo, which I wanted to reference in the design. These features made it ideal for my H1s.

Arial, on the other hand, is an extremely useful font. It lacks serifs, which makes it suitable for body text. It has a good balance between thickness and thinness. In general, it is easy to read and unobtrusive.

For my color pallet, I chose colors that referenced space (black and white) and a yellow found in the black hole image. This yellow is visible against the background while not being so contrasted that it is uncomfortable to look at.

Final

While a delight as far as concepts go, the first result was hardly one for the portfolio. However, at its core, it did contain the purest DNA of who I am creatively. So much so that I plucked it up from where it lay buried in my dedicated school hard drive and began the process of sanding away the sharper edges. By that I mean that I replaced every single asset, keeping only the font.