Mars One Gala Event (Takeaway and Invitation)

Print related designs for the "Mars One" Gala, held in honor for the participants that have been chosen to go to Mars. The designs include an invitation, take home item (poster), and place setting. Extra work to make the designs possible is the designing of symbols, choice of subjects to promote, and research sources that relate to the subjects.

The goal of the Mars One Gala event was to attract individuals that are either interested in space exploration or want to go to Mars and convince them to fund the project. Included in this Gala event was an invitation to attract them to the event, an item that they could and would want, to take home with them or even want to take to Mars with them, as well as an identity relayed through symbols for this event specifically that speaks on the Mars Curiosity Rover missions.

When confronting the design tasks of this event, I spilt my tasks into two parts, symbols and items. First I developed the symbols as I researched more about Mars and space exploration and then I used them in the items that would be given to guests of this event.

The aim of this symbol set is to make them represent the real life Mars Curiosity Rover mission. The whole symbol set needs to represent everything that the rover offers to the public in order to help NASA recieve more support to get more rovers on Mars.

The largest difficulty faced when making this symbol set is attempting to avoid ambiguity when picking the four major aspects of the rover’s mission to design for and also keeping the symbols universally sound, meaning that any person from any region of the world can understand the symbols. A smaller difficulty was breaking
cliches that would completely trump the point of me designing the symbols in the first place.

Choosing specific subjects of the goals and points of the Mars Rover helped the designing process seem less gruesome when thinking of what symbols to specifically design.

The largest difficulty faced when creating this gala event was creating an item that my target audience would want to take home with them. After browsing the videos of the applicants on the Mars One site, and the people most likely chosen, and a good amount of them, had an industrial, technological, and/or engineering background. As such, they wouldn’t need an iPad or any sort of technology since they all already have technological devices of their own. The take home item itself needed to be intricate and simple to use.

Having a poster that can fold to a much more compact version for travel’s sake was the perfect solution. The placement of the poster is flexible since it can be hung on the wall or even folded like a little booklet. The folds of the poster make a more dynamic layout and booklet that looks elegant. The poster itself is a series article that the people going to Mars can keep to remind them of the Gala where they were selected to go to Mars. It’s a memorandum.

The invitation mirrors the fold pattern of the poster. The resemblence between the two is strengthened further by having the same transparent print of Mars. It was made with the intention of capturing the attention of future Martians by giving them something small, compact, surprising, and fun to play with.

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