Every year we do a holiday card and letter that we create ourselves. The front is usually a pretty picture of some kind, the inside is our annual letter, and the back is a star chart so folks can go stargazing for a week around Christmas Day and see some lovely sights.

This year we found our “pretty picture” artwork on the Hubble Space Telescope holiday card web pages. They have designed a series of printable pieces suitable for greeting cards, sort of like this one.

I think the designs they came up with are very clever and show artful use of space images as design elements. What are design elements, you might wonder. They are what they seem to be: elements of design, whether colors, image portions, graphics, sculpted text, and shapes that breathe life into a piece of artwork (and that’s really what each of these designer cards is).

I’ve used space images as elements throughhout my website and blog, and if you visit enough astronomy and space science-related blogs, you’ll see bits and pieces of space scattered through those pages, too. Look at the logo in Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site. There’s an actual astro-image mapped over his title letters. Or, check out The Nine8 Planets page uses images of the planets as a sort of logo in the upper left corner. Or, one of our blogrollees, Observing the Sky, is using two astro images in the banner to achieve an appropriately “spacey” look.

Pay attention as you rove the Web and see what other design elements from space have made their way into people’s blogs and online spaces. You’d be surprised at how popular space images are in the blogging world, even if the sites aren’t about space.