Sometimes it is the subtle things or the details that can make all the difference. When designing elements for Spacevidcast I try and make sure the details are right. One of the items that had bugged me about the different Spacevidcast shows was that they all looked, well, completely different!

We actually have 4 different shows we produce and with it 4 different sets of graphics. You’re probably most familiar with our two most popular shows, the weekly live show and the SpacePods. But for years now we have also produced launch events such as space shuttle launches as well as the after-show show known now as After Dark.

Back at the beginning of the year I set out to make it very easy to tell when a video was being produced by Spacevidcast. This would help viewers understand where the video was coming from. Is it an official NASA video? It is something community related? Who made this and what is it for? That’s how the simplified lower third graphics came to be. The bug (which is TV term for the shows logo that is always on the screen) had expanded to not just be out blue circle logo, but also have the name of the show and the date always burned on the screen. This may annoy a few people, but years from now when you’re searching archives you’ll very easily be able to tell when a video was produced, what show it was for and what it is about just by looking at the lower left side of the screen. This design did create a challenge though. Unlike in years past I wanted all of the graphics to both look alike as well as give a visual cue as to which show you’re actually watching. Those two things sound like they are diametrically opposing. How can you have graphics that look the same yet convey completely different things? The answer can be found in the FedEx logo.

Ever see a FedEx ground and air truck drive by at the same time? The FedEx logo is almost exactly the same. Same font, same spacing and if you’re not paying attention it would look nearly identical. But the FedEx ground logo is purple and green. The FedEx air logo is purple and red. FedEx critical is purple and blue. In fact there are a bunch of different colored logos that mean different things. The brilliance behind it is that you may not have noticed that each logo is a different color directly, but sub-consciously you know each package was sent a different way based on the color you see. The brand stays the same, the visual impact stays the same, but a simple tweak in the color and you can change the meaning of the logo itself.

FedEx isn’t the only company to do this. When apple switched from the single multi-colored logo to the one color glossy logo they actually switched to a series of one-color glossy logos. A red apple meant AppleCare. A blue apple meant consumer/retail. A grey apple meant corporate/enterprise. And so forth and so on. Apple has grown quite a bit larger over the last few years and with that growth they seem to have dropped the colored logos. But the idea is still brilliant.

Each Spacevidcast show does the same thing as FedEx and Apple. We have a different colored graphic for the bug, or main logo of each show. The graphics themselves are identical, but the colors shift slightly. You can see how each show looks by the graphic below, but the way it works out is: SpacePods are purple to match the open, live shows are yellow to offset the blue of the info graphic, After Dark is black because, well, it’s after dark and live launch coverage is a medium grey color to allow the green, yellow and red status graphics to stand out more so you know what is happening with the launch.

And now you know one of our little secrets that we employ to try and make your life easier. You may not have ever directly noticed the color coding before, but it has probably triggered something in your brain that lets you know exactly what you’re looking at and what you should expect. Some of you may have noticed the colors but not known why we did that or why each color was chosen. The best part is that this is just one insight in to our graphic design. There are a lot of elements that went in to what seem like pretty simple banners: why the logo is placed where it is, why there is a blank bar under the graphic and of course why the graphics are translucent now. Each item was designed, implemented, tweaked, re-implemented, tweaked some more and implemented again.

Hey, every pixel counts!