I’ve long loved astronomy. Spending even a few seconds thinking about the wonders in the universe gives me a sense of joy. I marvel at what the scientific community has been able to learn about its inner workings from our tiny blue marble. When I stumbled upon Thomas Wright’s grand poster of his astronomical illustrations from 1742, I was immediately drawn in and thought recreating them would be a fun project.
Org charts tend to be a rather boring affair—with their lists of names and who reports to whom—but they didn’t start out that way. One of the first in American business, is a stunning portrait of a classic institution—the New York and Erie Railroad. Drawn in 1855 and only rediscovered in recent decades, this diagram captured my attention and I finally took the time to recreate it from scratch as a fun technical exercise. What was unexpected was the depths I ended up going to in order to learn about its fascinating history.
Recreating Mose Harris’ color wheels from the eighteenth century seemed straightforward until it wasn’t. I’ve long admired his “prismatic” and “compound” wheels and set a small design challenge for myself to recreate them digitally. As with most projects, it took an unexpected turn, but ultimately a good one.