This truly phenomenal project is from Margot Trudell, a graphic, web and motion designer living and working in Toronto, Canada. They are available as art prints or stretched canvas here. I am definitely wanting to get some for the kids' study.
From her project page:
OMG SPACE
With this project I wanted to communicate to people what we've managed to accomplish in space exploration in simple terms; I found that many people don't know much about the subject because of how it's typically communicated, with scientific and technical jargon. Through the use of infographics that simply and clearly illustrated a lot of information, people could easily take a brief look at one infographic and even without looking closer grasp that we've managed to send a lot of things and people to the moon for example, and looking closer they could see that China has plans for a manned lunar mission within the next few years, for example. This simple and easy to understand approach is meant to encourage people to look into the field more, and the OMG SPACE name is meant to encourage excitement about space exploration, especially amongst younger people. Infographics for the dwarf planets Haumea and Makemake were not created due to a lack of imagery available for use; it should be noted though that there have no no expeditions to either of thiese dwarf planets to date, and no expeditions are currently planned.
These infographics were intended for print, and thus the copy on most of them isn't easily legible when reduced in size and resolution for the web. I have included the blurbs about each planet below the image for easy reading. I researched and wrote all the blurbs myself, specifically choosing facts about each planet that I thought were particularily interesting, rather than standard facts like mass and age and geological make-up, to help people look at these planets in a different way than usual.
There is also a website associated with this project,omgspace.net. Aside from promotion, I used the web and the lack of limitations in web design to illustrate the true scale of our solar system. The images of all the planets and the distances between them are completely to scale, and there are links at the bottom of the page to take each visitor to whichever planet they choose; I also included the asteroid belt and the heliosphere for the sake of illustration, which are also placed correctly and sized to scale.
