NASA Psyche Inspired Internship

Project Type: Graphic Design

Role: Internship

Timeline: September - August 2020

Tools: Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop, Laser Cutting

Overview: An 8-month internship in which I was tasked with creating 4 projects of any medium. The only central theme was that all needed to draw some form of inspiration from the NASA Psyche Project Mission.

01 Psyche Vintage Travel Poster

An internship for NASA's Psyche Project mission. The goal for this project was to create artistic works that could inspire an audience to gain interest in the mission as a whole, as well as inspire younger audiences involved in STEAM to explore their creative passions. For this project, I explored a variety of styles and concepts derived from the Psyche mission in order to reach a wider audience and create art with impact.

02 Origin

This minimal design was created with the idea of expanding upon the symbols created by astronomers for the first few discovered asteroids. (16) Psyche’s symbol was a semicircle with a star above. At the center of Earth – the core – and at the surface of our planet, strands reach out to the stars, grasping for a better understanding of the structure of our own world.

03 Psyche Logo Lightbox

This project is a laser-cut lightbox of the Psyche logo. I took the original design and colors of the Psyche logo and divided every shade of the gradient into a separate layer and formatted it for laser cutting. In order to capture the differences in the logo’s colors from the dark purple to the bright orange, I needed to make the darker colors further away from the light via more layers of paper, and I needed to make the lighter colors closer to the light with thin layers of paper.

04 Formation | Aspiration | Connection

The first artwork features the abstracted idea of what (16) Psyche looked like when it collided during its formation. For this, I hoped to capture the chaos and intensity of the impact, as well as the formation of the asteroid we know today. The second work features a hand reaching out to grab the asteroid itself, a metaphor for our idea to come into contact with the asteroid and begin to understand the information it yields. The final artwork depicts the launch of the spacecraft from Earth towards (16) Psyche.

Conclusion

These projects are now displayed throughout the Psyche website and are used as promotional material for the Psyche program as well as being used on Psyche and NASA's social media content. The projects were later displayed in a virtual gallery open for public attendance. Overall this project taught me the importance of time management as well as processing sketch work prior to creating finalized digital iterations.