2019

This is (Not) A Simulation: A Photo Essay

Minutiae: Artifacts of Apollo 11

Giant Step: The Apollo 11 Presidential World Tour

Apollo 11 Book Series
This is (Not) a Simulation, Minutiae, & Giant Step
2019

Role: Book Designer

Designed for: Graphic Design Methodologies

In Fall 2019, students of Jessica Svendsen’s Graphic Design Methodologies class were tasked with choosing a single topic to focus on for the semester, to be analyzed through a variety of lenses and transformed into different designed objects. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing that year, I spent the semester immersed in the written and photographic history of Apollo 11, generating three unique publications focusing on little-focused on elements of this iconic moment in history.

This is (Not) A Simulation is a photo essay created by parsing through hundreds of photographs from the Apollo 11 image archives. Photos from the astronauts’ training procedures were selected to be depicted beside visually similar images from the mission itself, signified by the T- and T+ timestamps, which represent the time the photos were taken relative to the rocket’s launch on July 16, 1969. This photo essay was created as a play off of moon landing conspiracy theories and celebrates the intense training necessary to bring mankind to the lunar surface.

The second book, Minutiae, was designed using the digital records of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s Apollo 11 collection, which contains over 400 unique items. Designed as a multilingual museum visitor’s accompaniment for a small portion of the collection, Minutae seeks to emphasize the small parts necessary to achieve a task as momentous as a moon landing. The booklet is divided into three sections—cloth, metal, and plastic—and all photographs were made monochrome to draw focus to the tactile nature of the objects displayed.

This project culminated in the 200-page Giant Step, which documents the 1969 world tour that Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins went on following their arrival back to Earth. A passionate personal research project, Giant Step was designed to contain all of the publicly available information about this world tour, which, though being a remarkable moment of global celebration, is seldom remembered in the wake of the moon landing. Giant Step presents a variety of photos and national archival footage from the tour, alongside the tour’s scarce textual documentation, including interviews, transcripts, news articles, auction item descriptions, and journal entries. It is self published for purchase as a hardback through lulu.com.