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\nWhenever The Planetary Society takes on a creative design project, we\u2019re faced with a challenge: how to marry scientific accuracy with artistic style. The design on the newest Planetary Society member shirt was one such challenge. We wanted to show the worlds of the Solar System, but how?<\/p>\n
\nAs advocates for exploration of all planetary bodies, we wouldn\u2019t want to make any omissions, but there sure are a lot of worlds out there. Scale complicates things further. Any graphic attempting true distances would place the outer planets somewhere off the hem of the shirt.<\/p>\n
\nTo solve this problem, we turned to longtime Planetary Society designer Thomas Romer, the artist behind the merch in our online store, the mission patches for both LightSail 1 and LightSail 2, and more. Romer\u2019s visual style has become part of the organization\u2019s identity, thanks to his ability to blend scientific accuracy with graphic clarity. This new piece follows in the footsteps of his previous member-exclusive T-shirt designs.<\/p>\n
\nTo depict the Solar System in this project, Romer took an artistic approach that creatively retains a sense of relative size where possible, but abandons physical distance entirely \u2014 the worlds depicted are jumbled together, rather than stretched out in a map of orbits. It\u2019s like our planetary neighborhood is together at a planetary block party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n