NASA Case Study

About NASA

NASA is a well known space agency in the USA, focused on pioneering the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.

Project Requirements

For a while now I’ve noticed the design of the official NASA website is very old. Every time I visit I feel the site could be greatly improved and brought up to date with a more modern feel. I set myself a goal to redesign the homepage of the current NASA website. Below are the mockups (Currently fully coded and responsive) of the idea I had.

The Solution

Firstly I swapped out the logo. I opted to go for the minimal and more ‘space-looking’ logotype that seems to be underused. Following on from this, the navigation has also been tidied up. Gone are the vertical dividers that take me back 10+ years.

I decided to bring the search front and centre so people could go straight to what they want to find out about. This is followed by a brief description of who NASA are. Admittedly if you don’t know by now you probably didn’t grow up on this planet, but any alien life stopping by will be able to get to know them better.

My favourite section of the update is the news area, featuring up to 8 of the latest stories, driven by imagery. It’s rather disappointing to see on the current website that the images have an overlay of white and blue boxes. Cutting back any background behind the text opens up a whole new view of the stories.

The mobile version also shows a number of improvements over the original, specifically the mobile menu which is now hidden off the screen and elegantly transitions into view. Currently it’s a clunky looking dropdown that pops over the content. The news tiles also work very well, using all the space available by sitting next to each other.

In the future I plan to build more pages than just the homepage. There would be a lot of fun to be had designing the galleries as well with all the awesome photographs taken.

Key tasks

• Redesign of an existing website
• New clean branding applied