Personal project

Redesigning NASA’s homepage in one night

Project: Personal / job interview
Year: 2019
Role: UX/UI design
Timeline: One night
Focus: Navigation, content, brand

For a job interview a few years ago, I was asked to redesign NASA’s website, and I had one night to do it. NASA has an incredible amount of content, but the homepage felt cluttered and the giant menu kept getting in the way. I wanted it to feel like exploring space again, not digging through a filing cabinet.

Where it started

This is what nasa.gov looked like back then. Every story got the same size box and the same weight, so nothing really stood out, and the menu took up a big chunk of the top of the page.

The old NASA homepage, a dense grid of equal sized story tiles under a large menu — The old nasa.gov homepage.

What people actually come for

I didn’t have real user data, so I made an educated guess about what most visitors are there for: the latest news, the Image of the Day, and NASA TV streaming live from the ISS. Those three became the main focus of the page, and everything else moved out of the way.

Borrowing from 1976

For the look, I went digging through NASA’s own history and found the 1976 Graphics Standards Manual. I brought back the “worm” logo and its typeface pairing so it would feel nostalgic but still modern. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing was coming up, so I built the page around a lunar background and color palette. It’s set up so the imagery and colors can be swapped out later. All the photos came straight from NASA’s media library.

A smaller menuThe huge homepage menu moved into a slide-out panel, which freed up the whole top of the page for content.
Focused contentNews, Image of the Day and NASA TV get real space instead of fighting with everything else.
A brand refreshThe vintage worm logo and type give it a sense of history while still feeling current.

The finished homepage

The redesigned NASA homepage with an Apollo 11 hero, missions carousel, Image of the Day and NASA TV — Homepage redesign, built around the Apollo 11 anniversary.

The slide-out menu panel over a photo of the moon — The slide-out menu.

Plot twist

NASA has since redesigned their site, and I was pretty happy to see it ended up looking a lot like mine. Doing this under a tight deadline pushed me to make decisions fast, and I’ve been wanting to take another pass at it with everything I know now.

Thanks for flying with me.

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