Remix in Spaaaace!

These delightful ways of playing with NASA’s logo show off the power of remixing on Glitch.

Anil Dash
Glitch
3 min readMar 27, 2017

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When we say that Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll make the app of your dreams, one of the key reasons we think that’s true is because of the power of remixing.

What does “remix” mean on Glitch? It means you (yes, you!) can reuse the code from another project on Glitch, tweak it or personalize it to make it your own, and share your improvements with the world. But it’s easier to show you than to tell you.

Enter the Meatball

NASA (the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has had a series of logos over the years, each of them differently awesome.

NASA calls the blue circle logo the “meatball”, which seems a little hurtful tbh

If you’re really into NASA logos, there are lots of different histories of where they all came from and how they’re used. Spend some time learning about how the awesome 70s-era “worm” logo was wrongly set adrift into space.

BEHOLD THE SPACE WORM

But back here on Earth, our friends in the Glitch community have found some fun new ways to make the NASA logo a lot more personal, and to show off the power of remixing on Glitch.

First, Dan Reeves (with an assist from Tom Hazledine and Cornwall Geeks) created the “Make your own NASA logo” project on Glitch:

This auspicious start was announced with a simple, fun tweet:

And of course, that’s awesome enough on its own. But in this initial, quick implementation, Dan’s version had a separate text input that you had to type your message into before it would be added to the custom-animated NASA logo.

That’s where the fun of remixing comes in. On any Glitch project, you can view the code for yourself (tip: just go to glitch.com/~projectname to see the code, which in this case is glitch.com/~nasa).

Jordan Scales did exactly that, and made some slight improvements, announced with this delighted tweet:

And you can see the out-of-this-world results for yourself with the new Nasafy:

Or, just check out the Nasafy app, which now has inline editing to make your own fun, animated NASA-style logo. And maybe you can think of a way that you’d want to remix the app yourself to add some more tricks to the mix?

In conclusion, PIGS IN SPAAAACE!

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Anil Dash
Glitch

I help make @Glitch so you can make the internet. Trying to make tech more ethical & humane. (Also an advisor to Medium.) More: http://anildash.com/