To The Moon

Huntsville’s Contribution to Space Exploration

For the first poster in my thesis project, I chose to highlight Alabama’s contribution to the moon landing, the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V rocket, which put the first man on the moon, was developed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama by Dr. Werner Von Braun and his team. Huntsville is home to the US Space and Rocket Center, the largest space museum in the world. And Huntsville is still contributing to deep space exploration with the development of the Space Launch System, also at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center. When it comes to Huntsville, the place loves space. 

Process

I built the foundational shapes of the Saturn V rocket in Adobe Illustrator. I then sent that image into Procreate and drew additional elements. Next, I sent the new drawing back to Adobe Illustrator and vectorized everything using the image trace feature. To give the poster a feeling of trajectory and upward motion, I rotated the rocket image to point towards the top right corner of the frame. I added offset trapezoid shapes to effect a mid-century modern aesthetic to the design and positioned those at an angle running parallel to the rocket as well. To add to the feeling of movement and momentum I added stroked lines, which again run parallel with the rocket to create a feeling of objects flying past the spacecraft as it blasts into orbit. To create the faint background texture of a field of stars I used a transparency mask which I created from a texture overlay. The text itself is an excerpt from a speech on the nation’s space effort given by President John F. Kennedy at Rice University on September 12, 1962.