Space Age Retro-Style Posters From NASA - For Free!

The Grand Tour – NASA Space Age Travel Poster – Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

This beautiful series of space age retro-style posters, which were commissioned by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, are available in high resolution print-ready files for free.

All 14 posters can be downloaded for free from the Jet Propulsion Lab’s website. Beware: some of the files are in excess of 200 megabytes (HUGE) so downloading might take a while on a slower connection. For printing at poster size, the largest file available will be required for proper resolution. The smaller files will not look good printed at poster size since they have been sized for screen display.

For inexpensive and quick poster printing, Sam’s Club and Costco both have online services that allow for uploading the print files and picking up the finished poster in-store.

For those who don’t want to be bothered with printing their own posters, a few of the designs are available online for $40 each on the Invisible Creature website. According to an article on The Verge, the posters were designed by Seattle-based design firm Invisible Creature. The product description indicates the finished poster will be printed on thick Cougar Opaque Smooth Cover 80# White Uncoated Stock (nice!) and signed by the artist. Unfortunately, The Grand Tour appears to be sold out at the time of this writing.

For framing solutions that won’t break the bank, check out Aaron Brothers. If there’s a store nearby, they’ll probably have a poster sized frame that will fit the bill. Framing tip: buy a frame that’s larger than the poster but in the same aspect ratio (at least three inches all around), have a black mat cut to fill the frame, and mount the poster centered onto the black mat with archival-quality double sided tape.