A Week of Spaceport America

Projects evolve. Like other life forms, there are a lot of trips down side roads and branches of the evolutionary tree that turn out to be interesting but don’t lead to a favorable mutation. When you plug this normal iterative dynamic into a project with business, social and branding complexities, you get two things. One is a lot of balls in the air at any given time and the other is the kind of multi-dimensional project we love at IDEAS because it touches everybody. Besides the design of a great guest experience for Spaceport America, we’re charged with creating (and re-creating!) a viable project budget, an operating and transportation plan and proforma, a new brand, a sponsorship plan, a marketing plan backed by market research an educational outreach program and all the content.

This past week, we started in New Mexico on Monday in an intense two-day brand and visual identity workshop with the entire New Mexico Spaceport Authority team. That led us to this week’s work blowing out every conceivable version of the logo supported by the design brief. We’ll go through hundreds of variations of the mark and logo (and by “we” I mean one of our wonderful artists Red Hughes). By Friday, we should have the final winning solution and commence the brand standards manual just in time to start getting things like uniform patches and vehicle emblems in the works. We were back on the plane last Tuesday for two days of meetings here at IDEAS with the entire design team, our NMSA client and colleagues from Virgin Galactic. This was a milestone. Not only did we walk the entire guest experience through every square foot of our proposed facilities and show systems, it was the first time our whole team had ever been in the same room physically as our team has members from Irvine, California, Albuquerque, NM, Kansas City and Maryland.

The design review was a great success. You can tell because we made decisions, made changes (in fact, very little we went in with was left untouched) and emerged with a truckload of “To Dos” for this week across all the disciplines. I think it was also a way for the team to re-connect with just how powerful they are—truly an all-star team. We’re pushing for schematic design by the end of March so we have our hands full. For me, this is the best part of the work. It’s still flexible but it has enough reality and structure now that you can really see it and imagine it as it will be on opening day. 2013 suddenly doesn’t seem that far away!

Spaceport America Vendor Registry

Click HERE if you would like to register to offer services and/or products that will support the direct or prime contract needs for Spaceport America.