At any time when The Planetary Society takes on a artistic design undertaking, we’re confronted with a problem: how you can marry scientific accuracy with creative type. The design on the latest Planetary Society member shirt was one such problem. We needed to point out the worlds of the Photo voltaic System, however how?
As advocates for exploration of all planetary our bodies, we wouldn’t wish to make any omissions, however there certain are a number of worlds on the market. Scale complicates issues additional. Any graphic making an attempt true distances would place the outer planets someplace off the hem of the shirt.
To resolve this downside, we turned to longtime Planetary Society designer Thomas Romer, the artist behind the merch in our online store, the mission patches for each LightSail 1 and LightSail 2, and extra. Romer’s visible type has change into a part of the group’s identification, because of his potential to mix scientific accuracy with graphic readability. This new piece follows within the footsteps of his earlier member-exclusive T-shirt designs.
To depict the Photo voltaic System on this undertaking, Romer took an inventive strategy that creatively retains a way of relative measurement the place attainable, however abandons bodily distance completely — the worlds depicted are jumbled in, reasonably than stretched out in a map of orbits. It’s like our planetary neighborhood is collectively at a planetary block get together.
