Anastasia Murray
Exoplanet Trading Cards
An out of this world collection of 27 trading cards with hand drawn illustrations and graphic elements. These cards utilize research from NASA to describe exoplanets that have potential to support life, and exoplanets that definitely can't. The information on these trading cards also intends to educate, with cards focused on explaining how we discover, measure, and categorize.
Card Front Illustrations
Mockups
The trading cards went through rounds of user testing and review in a simulated card show. Paired with the trading cards were stickers of the planet overviews and 2.5x3.5 prints of the card fronts.
Hand Drawn Iconography
Planet Overviews
Uniform exoplanet overviews were illustrated for every card to give a sense of the planet type paired with the name. These illustrations also serve as great sticker designs paired with the trading cards. Each digital illustration was created by referencing research by NASA and visually translating their potential conditions.
System Overviews
9 Illustrations were created to visualize each exoplanetary system explored in the cards. Each were also paired with specific illustrations of stars when designing the cards to quickly communicate the conditions and rarity.
Simplified Information
When it comes to the information and statistics put onto the backs of the cards, icons were created where information could be simplified, like orbital periods of each exoplanet.
"Transit" detection method iconography. The left design was the first draft, the design on the far right was the final design.
"Orbital Period" Iconography put on every card.
"Radial Velocity" detection method iconography. The left design was the first draft, the design on the far right was the final design.
"Microlensing" detection method iconography. The left design is the first draft, the design on the far right was the final design.
"Direct Imaging" detection method iconography. The left design is the first draft, the design on the far right was the final design.
Card Categories
Inhabitable card category - these cards are designed to highlight the strangest exoplanets that we've come across that are often completely unsupportive of life.
Habitable card category - these cards are designed to highlight the few exoplanets we've discovered within rare habitable zones of their stars. These exoplanets have potential to contain water and therefore support life.
Discovery card category - these cards are designed to highlight the milestone exoplanets that are acknowledged as the first discovered through the main methods of exoplanet detection. These cards are meant to educate the viewer on how we find and categorize.
Initial Card Design
Research into my topic revealed early on that there would be a lot of information to be organized on the back of the card. This inital design quickly revealed my need for simplified iconography to condense the space needed for statistical information to include more in depth information in longer sentence format.
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