Typography in Alien (2014)
typesetinthefuture.com
typesetinthefuture.com
See also "A critical flaw was a program management grown too confident and too careless, even to the point of missing opportunities to avoid the disaster." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/809121
> But managers demanded that worriers and doubters "prove something was wrong,"
I have no productive words to convey my astonishment.
This is not a problem for multiple reasons. Firstly, if you work in a mechanical field you know that machines regularly combine metric and imperial parts. You may have to use a 3mm hex wrench and then sixty seconds later a 3/32 hex wrench. Right now you're using an OS that labels storage in one unit and storage devices labeled in another, gigabytes and gibibytes.
The second reason is even simpler: the display on the Nostromo's computer is in-universe and the title card for the movie isn't. The title card could label the cargo of the Nostromo as 11.7 trillion pennyweights of ore and it wouldn't matter.
Also I don't know why he thinks "old man" as slang for father is British. It was in common use in the US in the 90s.
Anyway, mixing is just bad engineering. Which shows us that bad engineering is a thing for space craft of the future. Just why Weyland-Yutani's logisticians would cope with this mix of units for refinement capacity and / or payload is beyond me...
It's fairly common in the US for machines which aren't produced in large numbers. Specialized factory and scientific machinery especially. I encounter it with agricultural machinery and textile analyzers.
Just why Weyland-Yutani's logisticians would cope with this mix of units for refinement capacity and / or payload is beyond me...
...they don't. The title card is not in-universe. To the best of my knowledge there is no depiction of Weyland-Yutani themselves using imperial units.
My mother's 2018 Shark robot vacuum cleaner uses a mixture of 2.5mm and 3/32" hex screws.
And "old lady" was the "old man's" wife, but you don't call your mom my "old lady".
Only in America. In the rest of the world, you won't have a 3/32 hex wrench.
Wernher von Braun considered this a problem. He (and his team) once was frustrated when instruments came in yards and pounds.
I can believe that maybe geographic mile will be used in future but all those local standards cleary not belongs to space future.
It's one of my favorite sets. Unfortunately, it isn't available to purchase anymore. Signature Plastics said it would be coming back, but that was before the pandemic, and nothing's been said about it since.
I’m sure many know but the idea of having the mundane industrial theme transferred to space was supposed to have come from a student film called Dark Star[0].
Alien Isolation is also fantastic though hard to fully enjoy the atmosphere for the most part as it’s fairly terrifying.
There was a piece on hacker news a while back where a programmer talked through how he was asked to code up the graphics for the landing sequence.(3D terrain wireframe).
[0] https://lewtonbus.net/editorials/dark-star-chest-alien-burst...
"Haha. Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder."
This was also the last leg of the contract for the crew. Does that mean that Wayland-Yutani is actually exporting more minerals from Earth than importing?
"The five minutes to destruction are typographically uninteresting. Ripley makes it to the escape shuttle with no sign of the alien."
e.x.
Jurassic Park - Stuck on an island full of dinosaurs
Congo - Stuck in a lost city full of deadly intelligent apes
Sphere - Stuck in an alien ship on the bottom of the ocean
The whole genre is "Lost World" and goes all the way back to King Solomon's Mines in the 1800s.
The other seasons are made confusing seemingly on purpose without adding to the story.
In short, a MITH movie has our heroes trapped in a space due to a sin not of their making, there's a monster, and at least one character who is a wounded half-man harbinger of doom.
Once you know the ten categories, movies become pretty predictable after the first reel or so, so maybe you don't want to learn them.
I seem to recall ebcountering one that is somewhat more specific than TV Tropes’ “Closed Circle” [0] but less specific than “Ten Little Murder Victims” [1] that fits this, but can’t put my finger on it right now.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClosedCircle
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TenLittleMurderV...
In TV this form is often referred to as a "bottle episode"[1], and there's at least one article describing Alien as a "bottle movie"[2]. Presumably, this was done to maximize what could be done with its $11M (!) budget.
It's about creating a feeling. Fonts like other graphic elements CAN communicate feeling in addition to whatever they spell out.
The case of Moon and Alien, it communicates a non-empathic "Company" that has a lot to hide. A company that is literally cryptic to it's own employees, of course they're going to have unreadable user-hostile fonts.
A real-life analogy might be something like UI's from Oracle EBS (enterprise business suite): Horrific, outdated, grey-blah swing interfaces from the 90's that have tentacles in every aspect of employee work-life from vacation-requests to procurement, to bonuses and customer relationships.
Here[1] is a picture of Oracle EBS. To me it seems beautiful (literally).
And if I look at the more classic Swing style here[2] I almost feel urge to run around naked and scream about how damn beautiful it is. I certainly want every app I use and the OS itself to be entirely in this design and I would even pay just for that (because I feel like that would boost my psychological well-being and productivity).
So, given our perception of this same UI is on the opposite extremes I conclude this is highly subjective.
[1] https://cdn.app.compendium.com/uploads/user/e7c690e8-6ff9-10...
[2] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37069_01/html/E37073/figures/ide...
FWIW, you aren't showing that text often overflows it's textbox and you can't actually see what's in it without putting your cursor in and moving it to the end of the text. They didn't have the concept of expanding to fit content back then? or maybe most corporations can't afford the oracle consultant that will do it for them ! :-) It's OK though, most of the time you can just export to excel with a few clicks.
Of course, such applications require lots of tuning, and though they might have been cozy 20 years ago, they seem harsh and burdensome today because no one bothers to change stuff any more. You're just supposed to conform to it.
These days it looks like that font is more popular for graphic design than it is for actual OCR applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...
Also, you will not be able to avoid recognizing eurostile in every single evil future corp once you're done.
Care to join the modern world?
> An aside for future-thinking Alien fans: should you ever need to nuke a planet from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure, after all – then don’t worry yourself about the number of megatonnes that your nuke’s detonation will create. Megatonnes aren’t based on any of the units mentioned above.
Oh, excellent... Good job, humans.
"Can you make it look more futuristic? We're building a mining spaceship colony and it must attract the investors"
It is awful.
In particular I suspect that the '()' and '[]' glyphs are far more common in source code and terminal use than in cockpits. I found them far, far too similar. Also there's little distinction between 'O' and '0' , and between 'I' and '|'. Other than those problems, it's mostly fine - 'l' and '1' are usefully distinct, for instance - but the friction from those particular difficulties was enough to make me hate it.
(Also, I'm super jealous you went to the ATC academy. By the time I seriously considered it, I'd aged out.)
In fairness, a shell is a very different use case from a flight deck. (You note below that this is a flight deck font, not an ATC font.) An aircraft cockpit is mostly using type to display small pieces of isolated information, e.g. a speed or a list of 4-6 letter approach names, not a big wall of text (ACARS messages notwithstanding).
On top of that, part of the draw of sci-fi is to imagine a new, different world. That includes different fonts.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27088565@N07/2582809036/in/pho...
But most people paid designers instead of trying to DIY it, because place and paste was a difficult job.
I discovered type in the late 70s through these catalogs and I was instantly fascinated by the way the shapes of the letter designs somehow managed to imply mood, context, and meaning.
I still don't understand it, and I'm not sure anyone does. Professional designers understand it intuitively, but there's no definitive manual that describes how you get from a shape to an association.
Even with Eurostile - it's been used in science fiction for so long it wins by association. But it's only there because it works so well. Blocky, clean, functional, sans serif only gets you so far when you're trying to understand why.
It's hard to imagine doing the signage on a spaceship with Monotype Corsiva or Caslon. Of course you could... but not without generating severe cognitive dissonance.
And the music (Sinfonia No 2 The Romantic) takes one last moment to jump scare you with the horn (2:31 in this video).
Definitely recommend the whole blog, and not only this article.
Thank you!
Low contrast, huge margins, just not legible.