Topic awaiting preservation: WIP - Gaia (Page 1 of 1)

All the European Space Agency missions into space have logos. One of them (due to take off somewhere around 2010) is a mission to take a census of the bodies in our home galaxy, and is called Gaia. Officially

quote:

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Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy.

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As Scientific and Technial Webmaster for the ESA Research Science site, I'd been working on the web site with their publicist for some few days ( http://www.rssd.esa.int/gaia and http://sci.esa.int/gaia )., when she remarked that there was still no official Logo or "Mission Identity" for the Gaia project, and knowing I was into a bit of photoshopping she asked me if I'd like to come up with a few preliminary designs for them to consider.

After 6 months in the place, I've become really tired of seeing the usual boy's-toy "pikkie of a sattelite on a quasi-cozmik backdrop" formula, and since this mission is called GAIA, and it's about all the stars in our galaxy ... well ...

The basic image is here ( http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/3178600/ ) but in reality, the logo is a "square diamond" so the devart image has to be rotated 45 degrees counter clockwise ... i.e. she's looking up not across ...
This was one of the 4 or 5 30 minute sketches I manip'd together for them and they seem to like the concept, now I'm being asked to work up a high quality one for proposal to the PR department ...

It's been fairly enthusiastically accepted by the publicist and the mission scientist, but still has the difficult task of getting past the science team members, and fnally the ageny's PR department review, so there's a long road yet. Along this end of that roat she has also been turned into sidebars for MS-Word Letterhead and Powerpoint slides, and now has to be worked up into a draft for an A1 poster, and then simplified for use on baseball caps, polo shirt patches and Tee-shirt prints ...

I feel so connected to the Ozone and I wouldn't know half of what I know without you all, so I just wanted to strut a bit, and share with my gurus, inspirations, pals, muses, PS-pong opponents and fellow PS-hacks .... when it comes down to it, my success is your success ...

Now if they accept this design, I'm going to have to go begging to the lovely Tinder for me to put her picture into outer space without a fee ... yep ... if it gets accepted, she'll be painted on the side of a rocket, and shot out into the galaxy .... apart from other things.

I'll let you know the progress as time passes.

(edit - 2 hours later on Saturday Morning) I just took a look in my work mailbox and there was a mail waiting from the publicist - I'm being given access to the original photoprocessed composite images from Hubble so I can choose a few very high resolution starfield, galaxy and nebula images to use for the manip ... WOW!! .. THE photographs ... not the downloadable versinos ... the original 1200px per inch uncompressed tiffs ... straight to CD from the computers at this end of the Hubble Telescope .... SuperWOW!!


Bug-free software only exisits in two places
A programmer's mind and a salesman's lips

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 09-27-2003).]

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 09-27-2003).]

I recall some posts about doom and gloom and no work in the past.

Amazing how things worked out for you. Congrats on your success !!

sib

Very cool =)

trib: Really nice work - and you are right about those misson logos

Hope everything works out well on this front -it would be great to see your work used in such a way.

I also added you here:

:FAQ: Which inmates also hang out at deviantArt?

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

it's FAB dude - simply bEUtifull.
btw, what dose gaia mean? i've heard it once in a movie called final fantasy!?

I assume with "Gaia" ... they're referring to the (Greek?) Goddess of Earth. *shrug*

There are 2 ways of naming missions in the ESA Science Department. Either names - which are capitalised like proper names. These tend to be names after scientists like Planck, Eddington, Gallileo etc. ... or Acronyms - pronouncable words made up of the intital letters of some phrase - like the one we shot up on Saturday - SMART - the "Small Missions for Advanced Research and Technology".

Originally - in the case of this mission - GAIA was an acronym fir something like Glactic Astronomical Infra-red Array - but after a change in scope they're doing the same job, but with visible light instead, so the infra-red lost it's meaning and GAVA didn't sound so appealing. However the team liked the name, and people had already associated it with the project so they changed it to Gaia the name rather than GAIA the acronym ...

Yes Gaia is the Earth Goddess and/or an anthopomorphism of the spirit of the world itself depending on which ancient religion or philosophy you align yourself with. That was why I chose the imagery - I wanted a sort of image of a goddess reaching up into the cosmos and becoming made of stars - kinda allegorical reference to our own, and the Earth's progress towards knowledge of space, leading to a oneness with the cosmos ...

or other such pretentious words ...

Yeah Sib ... in the past 2 years I've been unemployed for about 16 months, but on April Fools Day I started work as the Technical Webmaster and Designer for the Research Science Division of the European Space Agancy - A full time job, good pay, 30 mins drive though the countryside to get to work, and NERD HEAVEN !! So I'm really "over the moon" in more ways than one


Bug-free software only exisits in two places
A programmer's mind and a salesman's lips

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 09-29-2003).]