A little background first…
While working at McREL, I created the logo, or a more accurately, mission identifier, for NASA’s Dawn mission. It’s still thrill for me knowing that it’s being used for multiple launch purposes—in the high bay and placards at Kennedy Space Center and NASA’s mission video. It’s the signature artwork adopted by the mission and applied internationally on all public mission products. Dawn is a collaborative partnership made up of the University of California, Los Angeles; Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Orbital Sciences Corporation; Los Alamos National Laboratory; German Space Center; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research; and Italian Space Agency.
McREL provides Public Education and Outreach support for NASA’s Dawn mission that is journeying to the main asteroid belt to visit two diverse protoplanets, Vesta and Ceres. Learn more at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.
I’ve wanted for some time to share the ideas that went into the final design. It’s fun to imagine the possibility that they could have chosen one of the other designs and could have turned out to be something else completely.
These were the 4 vector ideas I submitted, and it’s not a stretch to see the final design in #4 (below right). Really, there were 3 different ideas, one is a variation of another – pretty obvious.
From the get go I was given some specific elements that NASA wanted included in the final product. They included: the 2 asteroids-Vesta and Ceres and their names spelled out, the spacecraft, NASA-related affiliations and abbreviations and the word Dawn. The image of space that the spacecraft is set against was my idea. I also played around with gradients and textures in the rendering of the asteroids. 
I was given a lot of freedom with respect to color choices I could make, and I’m sure that as the process moved along and they saw what I was able to do, they became more sure about what they wanted. You can see how an element from one design is incorporated into another. To put it all together, I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
