As the overall creator of The Astronaut’s Cat, the design was a natural and inseparable extension of communicating the content of the book. First, I looked to the clean, minimal simplicity of certain Japanese picture books. This included employing background tints to pick out the simple line drawings. Later, the circle became a conceptual motif in the art and layout. The choice of Futura for the text resulted from researching typefaces popular during the Project Apollo era of the late ’60s and early ’70s. That choice seemed vindicated when I learned NASA used Futura on plaques left on the Moon.