Celebrating Past and Future: an Anniversary Poster for SAIC

Many years ago, the government contractor SAIC asked me to develop some design concepts to help them celebrate and promote their 35th anniversary. SAIC is an engineering and technology firm that’s all about innovation: developing solutions to improve the future. So an unusual problem presented itself: how do you visualize yesterday and tomorrow in one image?

One of my solutions was this poster that referenced the company's contributions to the Apollo missions of the 1970s, when SAIC was just getting started.

I started with a NASA photo from the Apollo 17 moon mission, which took place in 1972. The photo of astronaut Eugene Cernan walking on the Moon, with the American flag in the background and the Lunar Roving Vehicle visible on the right, is one of the most famous images in NASA history.

But I didn’t want the poster to be just about the Moon mission, because I didn’t want it to be just about the past.

Removing the photo’s moon-surface background and substituting an abstract blue environment, combined with modernist typography (Helvetica Neue), effectively re-contextualized the image to be less literal and more symbolic. It now seems less anchored to a single point in time, and more of a symbol of innovation and progress.