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One of my project pieces from my 4th year Illustration brief. As much as I hated the actual look of the final piece, I was still fairly happy about the original concept for the design. Essentially it consists of a hand-made book and 5 accompanying CD cases/CDs. The premise for the design was to give people a more accessible way to interact with the world of astronomy and allow them to relate to it on a familiar level. In order to do this, I collected a series of sounds recorded by radio telescopes and designed a CD cover for each, illustrated in a way that reflected the nature of the sound and how we could percieve them (For example, the 'clock-like ticking' of a spinning pulsar, or the 'fiery crackle' of saturn storms) By relating these transmissions to noises we are already familiar with, I hoped to bridge the gap between 'the alien/unknown' and 'the everyday/familiar'. The book itself required the user to turn back each page, to 'look beyond' what we can see and hear in our own world, in order to reach the CDs and perculiar recordings housed within (Yes, some sort of painfully executed metaphor). Like I say, the aesthetics of the work itself seem a little terrible now thanks to the horrible curse of hindsight, but the basic concept still seems to hold up some sort of potential. Hopefully I can revisit the idea someday and not beat it repeatedly over the head with an ugly stick.