With SpaceX shooting a rocket to the heavens and landing it safely back on its launchpad and NASA’s Europa Clipper jettisoning off to Jupiter’s moon, talk of space travel is in the air again. We Earthlings have been waiting a long time for more space-age enlightened entertainment—and so it comes as no surprise that Davide Mascioli’s Kickstarter for the Space Exploration Logo Archive (SELA) has been funded.
The project from Mascioli—a designer and art director based in Rome—features over 370 logos related to space exploration, divided into eight chapters and published in five separate booklets. Each logo is selected to tell the visual story of space exploration from the 1940s to the present day.
Mascioli notes that SELA will be printed in risograph on natural recycled Fedrigoni paper, in collaboration with riso specialist Oreri. Along with the booklets, the project also includes space propaganda posters and a set of stickers featuring the most iconic logos. As a complement, Mascioli has launched an online archive with the logos in vector format, all free to download.
While he is flying high, Mascioli and I communicated about the future of this retrospective collection.
How and why did you launch (no pun intended) this collection of logos and marks?
I started thinking about the idea roughly a year ago. Originally, the project was only meant to be a totally open and accessible online archive. I wanted anyone to be able to use it freely, and I realized that there was no such place.
I have also been a passionate collector of design books and logo collections for many years, so the idea of collecting everything in a book seemed like the natural evolution of the project. The idea was to make something that I wanted to own in the first place.
What sources did you use to obtain the examples?
The internet obviously played a crucial role, but unfortunately a simple Google search was not enough to get what I needed. I scoured thousands of pages for months, but the communities of enthusiasts played the key role. Without them, this project would not have been possible. They include spacefacts.de, collectspace.com, spacepatches.nl, space.com and africanews.space.
Were you surprised by how many space agencies and industries exist in the world?
Absolutely. My initial goal was to select only the best, prioritizing quality over quantity. I knew I would find a lot of material, but the more weeks went by, the more I kept adding dozens and dozens of logos. So, I went from an initial estimate of 150 logos to over 370!
I see you’ve included fictional logos as well. Is there a symbiotic relationship between real and fantasy?
Yes, very often science fiction anticipates future technologies, and sometimes even defines their aesthetics. That is why it seemed sensible and coherent to me to add this selection as well.
What do you hope your audience will take away from this project?
This project was born as a tribute to all the designers who contributed to make me so passionate about this topic. I hope that the work I have done will help pass on this heritage and that it can be an inspiration to others, as it has been for me.
The post The Daily Heller: Logos for the Wild Blue Yonder appeared first on PRINT Magazine.