Combining the Past and the Future: An Anniversary Poster for SAIC

A few 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 background and substituting an abstract blue environment, combined with modernist typography (Helvetica Neue), effectively re-contextualizes the image and nicely tells the story of SAIC’s involvement in one elegantly simple composition.

Astronaut Eugene Cernan

Due to some unexpected budget cuts and changes at NASA, Apollo 17 ended up being the final manned mission to the moon, and Cernan was the last human who has walked on the lunar surface.

Later in life, Cernan spearheaded various aeronautics projects, became a science contributor for ABC News, and wrote a memoir about his experiences in space titled Last Man on the Moon.

Electronica band The Crystal Method sampled some of Cernan’s space flight voice recordings to use in their track “High Roller,” on their 1997 album Vegas. Snippets of Cernan’s conversations with NASA’s mission control on Earth are used in the song, including the phrases “this transmission is coming to you” and “we can see the Earth.”