Mars — Studio Brief 01 — OUGD505

As exploration for the Martian currency idea posted earlier, looking into what famously characterises Mars and sets it apart from other planets will be a good starting point for finding an effective concept.

As Mars is a planet that has been untouched by humans, there has been no influential factors that can inspire the design of the note, other than natural/scientific finds.


Spectrography

Astronomers use light to analyse distant galaxies' elemental makeup. This light is then decoded by a 'spectrogram', which reveals an almost barcode like visual translation. This spectrogram is then compared to the corresponding elements:

The notes could be made up of a visual representation of the most abundant elements that make up Mars. However, this would only apply for one note and would need to be altered through a series, possibly splitting the completed graph up into sections to represent different values.

For example:

• Indigo/Cyan = 5 
• Green/Yellow = 10 
• Orange/Red = 20

Unfortunately, after searching around the web, this idea has been implemented by another designer and created into a typographic code to create a visual code that the user has to crack:

"Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer" — Humphry Davy

Sheerly out of wanting to think of a more original idea, means back to the drawing board:


Topography

Using the Martian terrain to visually represent the huge scale of the mountains could utilise a topographical scale and the hight of whatever mountain was being represented could be the value of the note.

Here is an example of a topographical map of Mars:

As a more specific example, here is a topographical map of Olympus Mons:

Olympus Mons is tallest mountain on Mars (That big red section on the map above... That's it!).

This concept seems very apt as Mars is renowned for having very tall mountains, it is incredible that a planet almost half the size of ours can have a mountain nearly three times larger than our own giant; Mount Everest.


This concept can be applied to many different mountains of Mars. Selecting 4 mountains will give me a strong basis of which to represent the notes in various values:

• Olympus Mons — 24,000
• Euripus — 18,000
• Tharsis —8,000
• Ascraeus — 4,000

Then, by utilising topographical maps of these mountains, it will be possible to create the pattern shown above of Olympus Mons.