The Cosmic Calendar is a concept put forth by the late Carl Sagan in his TV series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, as well as in his book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. He proposed that the cosmic calendar is a way of measuring time from the beginning of the universe to this moment. His idea was to compress all the events from the Big Bang, up until now into a single year. So the 1st of January is the day that the Big Bang took place and the universe was born, and the last Nano-second of the 31st of December is this very moment.
I chose this subject for the Milestones brief because every event in the cosmic calendar shaped the future of our planet and is the reason for our existence. According to the cosmic calendar, life came into existence on the 21st of September and us human’s in the last 8th minute of the last day (31st December, 23:52). The very thought that we are just a part of a small phase in the humungous life-span of the universe makes one feel grounded.
Since the topic I chose deals with the universe and space and gradually fades into the evolution of life on earth and humans, I chose to visually represent the type in the said manner. My main influences were the TV show “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”. The visual representation of the universe influenced me to illustrate the type in every milestone as I did.
The decision to keep the colour palette restricted to white, black and greys was to make the idea and the type prominent features of every page. Colour would only distract the viewer from the essence of the idea.
The binding method I chose for the project was an accordion/concertina style book. This represents how the big bang started off from a small dot (black hole) and then expanded into infinity i.e. the universe. Similarly, we start off from a compact book and it expands to tell us the story of the universe and history of our existence.