Science Fiction Movie Lettering

I would also recommend checking out the "Typeset in the Future" website [1]. It does a bit of a deep dive on several films, trying to identify the fonts visible, not only on the title logos, but also on labels, in-universe logos, etc. My favorite is the 2001 Space Odyssey one [2]

1: https://typesetinthefuture.com/

2: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyss...

Pretty cool. I'd love to see it sorted by year of release, since the change in style over time, as new fads and technologies emerge, is a pretty interesting story to track.

Some early science fiction movies used variations on the MICR font [1], which still appears on bank checks.[1] The amusing thing is that the real MICR font has no letters; just numbers and some delimiters. Those strange letter forms are designed to be read with a 1-track magnetic read head. A horizontal scan of the amount of ink alone is enough to uniquely identify the number. It's really a bar code made to be human readable.

[1] https://www.1001fonts.com/micr-encoding-font.html

Iron Maiden was one of the first bands that I got into and they had (and presumably still have) incredible visual imagery and graphic design. But, today I learned that the typeface for their logo¹ was not original. It’s very similar to the The Man Who Fell to Earth² which came out in 1976 (the only letter that looks different is the ‘E’).

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iron_Maiden_Logo.png

² https://reaganray.com/img/blog/sci-fi-logos/the-man-who-fell...

The original alien lettering is haunting. Simple but it’s my favorite on the list!

Interesting absence of scanlines. Close Encounters of the Third Kind has them but a image search appears to indicate that was only used in a few cases. The Matrix has somewhat of a scanline inspired artifact and Tron could be argued to be somewhere between the other two. Given how many consumer logos of the late 70s and 80s were influenced by scanlines, it's interesting that sci-fi logos appear to have mostly avoided their use.

The page displays the movie title logos for Superman I-III but not Superman IV or Man Of Steel. I suppose that's a selection bias from the website owner Reagan Ray.

Here's his page on Marvel Comics title logos: https://reaganray.com/2021/04/06/marvel-lettering.html

Then there were the fonts in the 70s, inspired by banking magnetic fonts

https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/471118810990909200/

Nice to see "Phase IV" get a mention. It's a wild ride.

I'm inclined to try and analyze with ML how typefaces evolve over time in particular domains

The Bride of Frankenstein lettering looks surprisingly like the Jurassic Park typeface!

Whoa, they're almost all using capital letters.

Missing:

• *batteries not included

• Bicentennial Man

• Billion Dollar Brain

• Blue Thunder

• Capricorn One

• Colossus – The Forbin Project

• Electric Dreams

• Eraser

• eXistenZ

• The Fifth Element

• Flight of the Navigator

• Gog

• Harrison Bergeron

• The Hidden

• La Jetée

• The Lawnmower Man

• The Monolith Monsters

• Looker

• Pitch Black

• Soldier

• Split Second

• Strange Days

• The Quatermass Xperiment

• Quatermass 2

• Quatermass And The Pit

• Them!

• The Thirteenth Floor

• Timecop

• WarGames

A post about typography in sci-fi movies and no mention of Avatar?!