ast week, Virgin Galactic became the first publicly traded commercial space company, with a listing on the stock exchange to back up their ambition to launch ordinary citizen on suborbital flights. For many, space travel is a dream come true. And when you’re selling a dream, you can’t play it safe with the branding. This is no time for Helvetica, house plants, and people-pleasing pastels.
For Virgin Galactic the challenge was to create something that looked at home within Richard Branson’s Virgin brand—which started as a British indie label and now includes airlines, hotels, even fitness challenges—while capturing the breadth and brazenness of sending people to space. It needed to honor aeronautic tradition—Galactic Girl, below, is a nod to the pin-up style paintings on WWII fighter planes—while charting new, futuristic territory.
To Virgin Galactic Design Director, Tom Westray, it’s essential that Galactic branding “reinforces the human spirit and the importance of human endeavor and exploration.” This is more than launching a new brand; it’s breaking the bounds of human mobility. “It’s breathtaking,” he says, “so it can't be stolid and unremarkable. It has to evoke some sense of transcendence and endeavor, right? I mean has to be bold.”
Here, Westray explains Galactic’s key visual components.
hilippe Starck was the leading designer on the brand identity and he really looked at the entire customer journey, in search of that one crucial
As Seen From Space
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aspect of the experience that was going to define Virgin Galactic. And he decided that it is not the rocket ride, it's not traveling at that incredible speed, and it's not floating in microgravity. It’s when you look out that window and see Earth for the first time. It's a transformational experience. It changes you forever. So he decided that was exactly what the visual identity needed to capture that moment when the human eye looks back on Earth. I think it’s an incredibly bold, audacious way to treat the visual identity project.”
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AS Seen From Space
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he Iris logo was featured on every Galactic business card. But rather than use one iris, each business card has an image of the iris of the cardholder. “I love when I
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see people receive a business card for more than oneGalactic employee at the same time. They look down at both of them, then it hits them...I've never seen a business card have such an effect. It serves a lot of purposes because if you think of the eye as imagination, the spark of human endeavor, then there’s the fact that you're looking at Earth from a different perspective, and the democratization of space travel, that anyone can go to space. I think it ties in well with the company ideals and brand.”
he typography [designed by Dalton Maag] works hard to make clear who we are and what we're doing within the space industry. I think it quite cleverly uses a
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science fiction perspective without looking retrospective, like something from the original Star Trek. It takes that science fiction and molds it with other progressive typography to create something that looks inherently forward-thinking.”
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irgin Airlines put the Scarlet Lady on the side of every one of their planes, so Virgin created its own lady for Galatic. One of our carrier aircraft [the host planes
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from which Galactic launches their rockets] is called Mothership, and so Richard Branson said, 'Well, if you're going to have a mother ship, you should probably name it after your mother.' So the Mothership is named Evette after Richard's mother. She’s one of the reasons why Richard is such an adventurer and a pioneer and such an explorer, and it represents this spirit of Virgin Galactic. And actually, the face of Galactic girl is taken from an image of her when she was younger."
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his is based on Floyd's The Evolution of flight or the DNA. It's not our company logo, but it's something that we use a lot and this is something which is very special
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to employees and customers alike. It starts with Icarus up to the modern era. This is something which is a special to people because I think when customers see it, they realize the historic nature of what they're embarking on many of them will be in the first thousand people to leave the earth atmosphere and which I don't think there's anything else in the world today, which can you can become a part history like that. That's something which transcends entertainment or sports or anything.
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Intro
Intro
AS Seen From Space
The Galactic Girl
The Evolution
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