Jess Lindsey is really, really good
New logo, gravitational lensing, and the James Webb Space Telescope
First, my sincerest apologies to Jess Lindsey for taking such a stupid long time to get this post out. There really isn’t much of an excuse. I’ve got a limited number of hours to write every week, and I have neglected to allocate any of them toward non-fictional stuff.
Which is what this is: a totally true account of how Jess designed the perfect logo for the Dispatches from Inner Space.
I reached out to Jess right around the time I launched this Substack, hoping to get some of the shine of her genius onto it. Because she is lovely and generous and wonderful, she agreed to help me out.
I won’t bore you with a detailed recitation of the whole design process — if you’ve ever been through it yourself, you know how exciting and frustrating it can be. Mostly it was me being annoyingly verbose and apologetic, and Jess patiently synthesizing my contradictory notes into something absolutely perfect.
So that’s what’s on the landing page now. Yes, you’re right, it’s amazing.
And here’s the logo/favicon:
I know! Also awesome.
One of the core inspirations for the design was a phenomenon known in astrophysics as gravitational lensing - this is what happens when you look in the direction of a supermassive object, like a black hole, or a cluster of galaxies, or your mom, and the light bends around it to reveal objects behind that object.
Why am I telling you this? So that I have an excuse to share one of the first images astronomers collected from the James Webb Space Telescope (if you haven’t heard of that before, please click that link), literally just weeks ago…
Do you see that, toward the middle? Those short curved lines are distant galaxies, whose light has bent around the “lens” of galaxies that are much closer to us.
It feels profane to go on talking after sharing that image, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Other than to say, if you need design work, Jess is an ace.
Quick reminder that Part 7 of Root Two comes out this Friday, and it’s a doozy. Here’s a link to catch up if you need to.
Love it!