Per aspera ad luna: Through challenges, to the Moon.
The Moon was once thought to have seas.
Early astronomers saw its dark plains and mistook them for oceans, calling them maria—Latin for seas. We now know those plains are vast fields of basalt, left behind by ancient volcanic activity.
They were wrong about the seas.
They weren’t entirely wrong about the water.
I was selected as a candidate for the Lunar Trailblazer by the mission’s principal investigator to help develop its visual identity and communications. And I was salivating. With a background in art, design, and even geology, I was honored to have a chance at branding and communicating the science of a mission to the Moon.
Lunar Trailblazer has a deceptively simple assignment: find the water without so much as touching the surface.
Its instruments measure reflected light and send the data back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, where spectral signatures reveal water and the minerals around it.
My job was to bring it down to Earth and translate all of that into…English.
There were spectral signatures to decode, instruments to explain, and an entire mission to make legible without turning it into a science textbook.
FINDING OUT WHAT ON EARTH I WAS LOOKING AT
Before I could figure out what the graphic should look like, I had to figure out what on earth I was looking at.
So I embarked on a mission of my own, consuming a glut of research papers, technical documents, mission resources, imagery, and scientific literature—both from the team and externally.
Old National Geographic infographics on space. The New York Times science section. Physical books detailing lunar water discoveries dating back to the 1960s. I looked at lunar missions. Studied spacecraft representations, scientific data visualization, geology, diagrams, and decades of space exploration.
There was no shortage of high-quality Moon imagery, either. LROC had that covered.
Inspiration
Things started to accumulate mass.
I had finally reached productive saturation.
THE MOON, READ DIFFERENTLY
I had plenty of Moon to work with. The trick was figuring out how to make it feel less like the Moon we’ve already seen a thousand times.
The interesting part of Trailblazer wasn’t simply the Moon itself. It was the way the spacecraft reads it.
Water leaves a signature. Minerals leave signatures. Light carries information about what the surface is made of.
That gave me a much more interesting place to start than another picture of a spacecraft floating heroically over a lunar landscape.
The science itself could become the visual material.
Those spectral signatures—normally the kind of thing you leave to scientists—became the bones of the visual system. Data became graphic forms. Lunar terrain became contours and linework. Observation footprints became geometric fields. Orbital paths became a way of showing the relationship between the spacecraft and the surface below.
The identity started to feel less like an illustration of a space mission and more like a visual record of what the mission was actually doing.
A SMALL SPACECRAFT WITH A BIG JOB
It’s not a giant spacecraft bristling with lasers. It’s a relatively small instrument platform doing some very sophisticated detective work.
Satellite That distinction mattered.
Trailblazer observes reflected light, maps the lunar surface, and looks for the spectral evidence of water and minerals from orbit. So instead of leaning into generic futuristic space imagery, I wanted the identity to feel observational, technical, and a little geological.
The mission mark became a starting point for that system.
The water droplet represents the obvious quarry. The geometric structure pulls from the crystalline and mineral world. Contours suggest both lunar topography and the signatures Trailblazer is looking for. The square field references the defined footprint being observed from orbit.
Logo Patch Space exploration logo archive From there, the language could expand into technical linework, measurement marks, spectral graphs, orbital paths, geological forms, and the spacecraft itself.
Color The Moon didn’t need another crescent.
GETTING IT RIGHT
The other half of the problem was accuracy.
Scientists don’t necessarily care if your graphic is attractive.
They care if it’s right.
Working with planetary scientists and engineers meant the feedback could get wonderfully specific. A line might imply the wrong relationship. An orbit might suggest something physically impossible. A tiny detail on an instrument could suddenly become the most important thing on the page.
Some versions looked beautiful but explained nothing.
Others explained everything, but you had to excavate the idea from underneath all the information.
The scientists forced me to defend the design. The design forced me to think harder about how someone outside the field would understand it.
That back-and-forth made the work better.
The goal was somewhere in between: rigorous enough for the people who actually knew what they were looking at, but inviting enough for everyone else.
It needed to work for scientists, space nerds, and people who had no idea what a spectral signature was.
MAKING ROOM FOR COMPLEXITY
The final system had to hold a lot at once: spacecraft motion, lunar terrain, instruments, water signatures, geology, data, and the relationship between the spacecraft and the surface below it.
I didn’t want to make the science simpler.
I wanted to make it legible.
There’s a difference.
A spectral graph doesn’t need to become less scientific to become interesting. A contour doesn’t need to stop being geological to become graphic. And you don’t need to understand orbital mechanics before you can follow a line around the Moon.
The design became a way in.
Follow the trail. Find the footprint. Read the fingerprint. Look for water.
Data Acquisition Strategy Poster THE RESULT
Lunar Trailblazer became a visual language for a mission looking for things we can’t simply see.
Mission Branding The Moon is still full of unanswered questions. At least now, they have a visual language.
Business cards Tragically, Lunar Trailblazer set off for the Moon and then got a little lost in space.
If you want to know more about that space drama, email me .
Client CalTech and NASA JPL
Year 2023
Skills & Tools branding, identity, illustration, science communication, poster, cartography
