Project overview

Team Indus is a private aerospace company sown and grown in my home country, India. During my time at the design studio Parallel Labs, I led the design for a brand new responsive (and highly interactive) website. What resulted was a rich visual experience combining storytelling and a crowdfunding campaign to gain additional support for the space mission. The process involved collaboration with the organization’s scientists, marketing and operation teams and the design and development team at Parallel Labs.

The context

At the time, Team Indus was aiming, literally for the moon, as the sole participant for the Google Lunar X Prize from India. Their mission was to send a rover to the moon, piggy-backing off the Indian space program ISRO’s highly dependable rocket, the PSLV. Our mission was to bring awareness to the effort and garner wide support among the Indian population. We received a set of newly designed brand guidelines that needed to be followed and built on top of to craft their new communication.

We did not go into the project blind. We had some background information on the project and we used that information to our advantage to craft a strategy for sourcing our audience and targeting the design.

Team Indus was aiming, literally for the moon, as the sole participant for the Google Lunar X Prize from India.

Design to impart a sense of wonder

One of the greatest things we had going for us was the exquisite subject matter. This was stuff that the audience doesn’t stumble onto very often. We used this potential to the fullest to make our design impart the same sense of wonder that we had while we spoke to the scientists at Team Indus.

Research between sprints and workshops

The research process consisted of design sprints, workshops and a survey of the present social media support. Our research showed that our target audience could be represented by four categories. Every design decision that followed was made with these four categories in mind.

Our audience could be divided into the following four categories — patriots, tech junkies, space enthusiasts and influencers.

Richness in motion

I used the style guide and the colors to put together a style of illustrations which came to life when combined with motion design. Each transition was thought through and I collaborated with developers to ensure that the movement and transitions were sculpted to perfection.

Illustrations to draw the eye 

Given the “out of the world” content, we believed the best way to bring a sense of believability was through illustrations combined with photo-editing. It is nowhere more prominent than in the Mission page which included information on how the mission would be orchestrated to success. The entire website was staged on a dark background to reflect the darkness of space itself.

Bringing history to life 

TeamIndus was not built in a day and we did not want the audience to think that it was. Telling the complete story of TeamIndus let the audience know that this was a credible endeavor that has been years in the making and endorsed by prominent and qualified individuals. This lent credence to the organization and helped in building a sense of trust.

An explicit show of support 

Social confirmation was very important to us. So important that we deemed it worthy of a separate page in itself, with messages of support from our audience which would be pulled from Twitter and Facebook. This feature was very useful in bringing visibility and to further foster support.

Aside from the message board, we also worked tirelessly to integrate the social media presence of the Team Indus marketing team. They had comics, blogs and something we liked to call “Telemetry” to keep with the aerospace parlance. All of these social media were brought to the fore with users being driven to the website from social media platforms and vice versa.

The messages page also included a form where visitors could direct their words of encouragement directly to TeamIndus’ crew.

Team Indus had a unique story to tell, one that could easily be dismissed as fictitious. A computer science guy stands up out of nowhere to lead a space mission? If that were true, the story could surely be used as inspiration fodder to lead the masses to aspire to something bigger. But it is true and it was not a story we could skimp on.

In retrospect

Communication FTW

This project is where my communication skills really came into good use. Speaking to the operations team, marketing team, engineering team and the in-house developers proved to be a veritable maze of negotiations which had to be overcome.

Balancing effort and impact

I had to make several judgments on where illustrations and animation would come into good use. Both of these were labour-intensive processes which should be budgeted for only if we know it is going to make a difference.

Speaking science to the people

Part of the trouble lay in translation. The scientists provided the content for the website in a very different tongue from what the general audience was used to hearing. This was an exercise in science writing which would be approachable by everyone.

Keeping up with an ever-evolving product

TeamIndus is an organization in constant flux. Our design process had to be tweaked and molded as their plans changed, the communication differed and as they overcame their own dissonance in communication between their teams.