Novis- Senior Thesis
For all the years I’ve been designing, I have always been drawn to outer space, and the design styles of the 50’s and 60’s. On occasion the two collide, and this project is the result of that. The concept for my thesis was to create a travel pack for accompany people on their voyages to the stars. I opted for the mid-century modern style, drawn by its (sometimes artificial) optimism for the future and its association with space travel.
It was during my Freshmen year of college where I thought of using the name Novis for a space tourism company, and it was during my senior thesis that I finally found the perfect opportunity to bring it to life!
For my thesis I designed the logo for Novis, luggage tags for the eight other planets in our solar system, a ticket from Earth to Neptune, a brochure for a flight to Jupiter, water packaging for on the ship, and postcards to send back home to Earth!
During the first stages of my thesis, I spent quite a while designing the logo for Novis. I got stuck with wanting to use the plane design that is on most iterations, but I ended up only using it on the ticket and brochure. You can see how my logo developed over time with all the iterations that I made. The design I ended up with came about when I was showing someone my luggage tags, and they said that the design I had for Mercury could be a nice logo. I pulled it out, tweaked a couple of things, and immediately fell in love with the final design. This logo encapsulates the optimistic spirit that I wanted to bring into every aspect of my thesis project. It represents that Novis is the shining sun that will guide you on your journey to the stars. It also allowed for me to have three secondary colors as the “planets” which helped evolve my visual ecosystem.
Out of all the pieces, the brochure proved to be the most time-consuming, with the process of sourcing images being the biggest challenge. I have dozens of different images that I created for the brochure, but ended up not using. Almost all of the images I found through an archive of 50s/60s travel postcards, and then photo-shopping images sourced from NASA into the background. I specifically choose Jupiter so I could include traveling to the different moons as well. I had a lot of fun with the writing, and trying to mimic the voice of a typical brochure that one would find at a national park. Creating this brochure also made me realize that I want to go into layout design/typesetting for my future as a graphic designer. Something about organizing images and text to be visually interesting while still relaying information is very satisfying
For the final ticket design I felt like I came out with a strong sense of hierarchy. Having to really think about which information was the most important when boarding a flight was something I never thought about before. When I finally completed the logo, it fit perfectly into the white space, and brought the whole thing together.
The luggage tags were the first thing that I designed, and I looked to old paper ones for inspiration. Creating designs for each of the planets was a bit of a challenge, especially with Mercury and Venus, which don’t have specific spots of interest like Jupiter and Saturn. As it being the first completed portion, part of me feels like it doesn’t quite have the same visual language as all the other parts, but nevertheless I’m happy with the way that they turned out.
Liquid Starlight was the last thing that I made for my thesis, and I’m very happy with the way that it turned out. I wanted to create water that one would have on their space flight, while keeping in mind that liquids would float out of any cups. I created the design on the tin in Illustrator, wanting to play more into the night sky than I did with my other pieces. I put the constellation of Aquarius in the background to rein- force the water theme even more. I then threw it onto a tin mock-up in Dimensions, using the water texture effect to create the actual spheres. I then finally created
the simple advertisement in Photoshop, adding a slight half- tone pattern to match with my other pieces.
I have always loved collecting old postcards, and peering briefly into other people’s lives. That’s why I absolutely had to create some that one might receive when traveling around the galaxy.
