As a part of the Graphic Design team for RISD Rover, I produced these set of posters in order to try and produce a specific aesthetic with many of the club's previously fabricated work. It was interesting to work with these images and try to produce posters that had a nostalgic feeling. I wanted to capture the visual qualities of an old , or somewhat lost design in time; specifically, I wanted to capture the original fascination that surrounded space travel during the 1950s to 70s. This idea of innovative design within a void is something that particularly interested me and it is someting that I constantly associate with space based travel.
The space race was a highly political event and posters depicting victorious spacecrafts navigating around dense planets and various cosmic structures were part of a visual strategy to sell the public on. I wanted to borrow and reappropriate some of that poster-based language but provide it a newer context. This context being the designs for the NASA artemis challenges through RISD Rover. Together, they function as a reminder of the highly political nature of the space race and how the highly politiczed and publicized events of space travel will once again enter mainstream discourse as we look to begin manned missions to the moons and mars.
The return of this political rhetoric is something I wished to comment on through borrowing the aesthetic that was present at the time of its inception. I also more generally wanted to comment on ideas of the nuclear family and the consolidation of the American identity during the cold war which I hope to tackle through subsequent iterations of posters. As a child of immigrant parents, the definition of the average "american family" is something deeply personal to me and is therefore of great intereset. Together, these elements are considered in the overall design and aesthetic vision for the posters which I hope to continue to iterate and build upon in style.
For this set of designs, I wanted to focus on creating noise within the picture; I was interested in producing a series of images that tried to obscure the astronaut suit while simaltaneously maintaing some level of clarity about what the suit really was. I wanted to produce these images to mimic classified documents or hidden images of a secret technology. They also experimented with ideas of abstraction and follow a color palette that was developed through workings of the club.
The abstraction and noise that dominates the composition of these posters was an exploration of aesthetic that also tries to insinuate that there is some level of disconnect between the experience of individual astronauts that experience space and those that are witness to the experience. Specifically how the experience of an astornaut traveling into and past the medium of space is one unique to them. -- how a change in environment can present a variety of changes in one's own experience; a feeling of disconnect and loneliness being separated from what they feel like they belong to. What does it mean to witness experiences and can one truly understand the feelings of those they witness despite having never experienced their life.
The following posters were developments on the aesthetic of a lost or timeless design. they try to suggest a sense of old or vintage poster type through the use of the color halftone dots, but also suggest a sense of futuristic design through the forms of the developed rover and suit. The color scheme was dictated by the color pallete of the club and other colors that provided a somewhat aged or worn look. They were also meant to provide a sense of intrigue by distorting the images of the work they depict. Ideally, many of these designs would function well with another design that depicts the full form of the rover or suit they depict. They also intend to speak to many of the ideas that the previous set of posters depicted; However, they are not as targeted and instead serve to develop the imagery of this poster series.
The following posters were a set of recruitment posters to be used for recuritment by the RISD Rover Club. I used imagery I had previously developed through other poster designs but I worked to make the form of the rover more readable. It became evident that including the full design of the rover would be important to advertise to potential fabricators who wanted to join the rover team. I also chose to include futura as the primary typeface for the design since futura was the first typeface to be in space. I chose to work with cool colors for these posters and was foscused on creating a set of 3 that capture different formal qualities of the rover. These designs would be used for recruitment and they were put up around RISD campus with the singular purpose of increasing membership on the fabrication team for RISD Rover.
