Know your night skies
The challenge —
’Space Place’ at The Carter Observatory (in the Botanic Gardens of Wellington New Zealand) is a wonderful place of learning, fun and events.
The team were on a mission to let the public know, there is a lot to learn about our unique southern skies, and it needn’t be boring or difficult to learn more!
A range of star gazing courses and movies in the planetarium were on offer during the school holidays.
The solution — I created a system of dots and lines that allowed us to illustrate a range of constellations in a simple graphic way. This was accompanied by story-telling hooks to get people to imagine what each constellation on the ads/posters and website were accompanied by small factoids of what each one truly was. A way to get people thinking and to engage with a wide demographic.
Outdoor interactive advertising
Know your night skies — hook line and sinker focussed on what would actually be visible in the sky during the school holidays
i.e. ‘Mauis hook, the pointers and the southern cross’ all visible in our night skies at the time.
We played around with the format to make the ads more intriguing… and supported these with quickfire animations showing people how to find the real constellations and asterisms in the sky.
Outdoor PVC banners were produced with glow in the dark dots for night time so car lights lit up the banners on drive by (in a safe and NON intrusive way of course).
Merchandise
T-shirts for Space Place featuring various constellations, planets or the moon.
Left: “It’s just a passing phase — she’ll get over it” [the cycle of the moon]
Right: “My best friend” — Canis Major one of Orion the hunters dogs.
Retail packaging for Space Place
The constellation we’re focussing on here is Gemini… the twins…, using a fun join the dots approach makes our paper bags an interactive game — reusable item.
Social
We did a series of animated ads all around the central premise of helping people engage with the night sky. ‘Know your night skies’.
We used simple to see/find constellations and had a lot of fun with story-telling.
