Design · Editorial
Viking 1
50 лет с посадки Viking-1 на Марс
A picture book with animated pages for the 50th anniversary of the first Mars landing
A book for children aged 7 to 12, and the parents reading with them, about Viking 1, the first spacecraft to land safely on Mars. In 2026 it will be fifty years since the landing. I told the story through NASA's own archive, pixelated into a collage that looks like the screens of the 1970s, and some pages move.
Mars becomes a symbol of waiting and hope.
Brief
A book about the first successful landing on Mars: the Viking 1 mission, which turns fifty in 2026. It follows the machine from the first idea, through the engineering tests, to the landing and the first photographs of another planet.
Instead of the usual festive story with ready-made magic, it is a story about the line between a dream and reality, and Mars becomes a symbol of waiting and hope.
It is written for two readers at once: children aged 7 to 12, who look and take part, and parents aged 25 to 45, who read with them and buy the book. I wanted it to start a conversation between them about the future, about how fragile a dream is, about people looking up.
Idea
Attention now jumps every second, so big ideas need simple images you can feel. A real moment from history felt stronger than invented magic: one that stands for dreaming, thinking and hard work.
The visual language comes from the time itself. Pixelated images point back to the 1970s, to old interfaces and slow transmissions from far away, and they make the pictures more fun for children to explore. Over them I laid a collage of archive photographs and engineering drawings.
I started in NASA's archive: the line drawings of the orbiter and the lander, photographs of the Martian surface, and material on how the spacecraft was built and how the mission ran. What caught me were the small things: old interfaces, codes, telemetry, how the engineers searched for a place to land, what the first pictures of Mars looked like. Those details became the collages and the look of the book.
Each page pairs one moment with one short text: the launch on 20 August 1975, ten months and 720 million kilometres of silence, the search for a safe landing site, touchdown, and the first photo, taken less than a minute after landing.
Pages that move
Some pages are animated in After Effects: the landing zone coming into focus from pixels to terrain, the lander passing over the cliffs, and the silence between the planets. The book's pictures are built from pixels, like images sent back from Mars in 1976 that arrived line by line. In motion, that becomes the story: the image starts as big blocks of colour and slowly resolves, the way the first view of a new planet did. They are short loops, made to be watched on a tablet as you turn the page.
Result
A digital picture book with animated pages, shown here on a tablet, and small anniversary merch: a woven “50 лет Viking-1” key tag and a T-shirt with the “Red dream” hands.
Credits
- Archive images: NASA/JPL (public domain): Viking orbiter and lander line drawings, Mars surface photographs
- Portrait, launch, crowd and hand photographs in the collages: archive and stock images
- Some archive images were enlarged with an AI upscaler (Upscayl)
- Mockups: stock templates
HSE Art and Design School, BA Communication Design