The most interesting thing for me was the Iconian Fonts website. One guy who is a "commercial transaction attorney for a global software and service company", that makes fonts as a hobby.
On his commerical use page, he just asks for a $20 donation if you use a font commercially. I wonder if he realised that his fonts would be used in billion dollar movie franchises.
Cool article but this first bit threw me off
The interpunct is still in use today—it’s the official decimal point in British currency (£9·99)
When the linked wiki specifically points out that it isn't:
In British typography, the space dot was once used as the formal decimal point.
And the government website doesn't use it [1].
So hard to see in what sense it's "official".
To be fair, traditionally 95% of digital content has zero amount of typographical finesse and simply uses whatever is available in the local standard keyboard layout. Even the use of em and n dashes is a big deal.
The decimal currency in the UK is essentially the same age as me - and I have never heard this claim that an interpunct is somehow more official. So the claim stood out to me as being outlandish; not impossible, just super unlikely.
To show I have no ill will toward outlandish Britishisms, this one applied in Parliament until relatively recently...
"To increase their appearance during debates and to be seen more easily, a Member wishing to raise a point of order during a division was, until 1998, required to speak with his hat on. Collapsible top hats were kept for the purpose."
https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-inf...
Yeah, I don't doubt you, just meant that web copy is usually so typographically impoverished compared to print that it's not in itself much of evidence.
Fun fact, Windows 8 changed the decimal separator for the South African locale from a period to a comma.
My theory is that some academic or idiot government official told Microsoft they're not using the official separator who duly fixed it. But in practice every "normal" person in the country used a period as a separator.
By default, Excel now uses a comma separator for decimals. Which unless I change it, makes it especially fun when I want to paste values into my banking website which (like most of the country) uses a period as a separator.
Really, it would have been way more pragmatic if South Africa just changed its official decimal separator.
It also caused some annoying issues on our .NET with SQL Server software project. For example SQL seed scripts inserting decimal values would break depending on if they were being run on Windows 7 or 8. On the upside, it did teach us all to have our code be properly locale aware.
Tangentially reminds me of how, in an early build of Win11, the localisation team at M$ changed 'zip' to 'postcode' for the GB language pack
People then had a lot of fun being unable to extract their .postcode archive files which suddenly came into existence...
AFAIR it was the localized name of the file type. File extensions would never go through i18n/l10n.
Stood out to me too, as was sure that was not true. I'm a native Brit, I'm on the wrong side of mid-40s, often read historical literature that uses pre-decimal currency (and notation), and have never seen an interpunct used at all, or heard it referenced in terms of British currency until today.
Unfortunately, I'm the sort of pedant who on seeing somebody state an incorrect fact with such certainty, I doubt the veracity of the rest of what they have to say. I wonder where the author got this idea from?
Born in the late 70s, so also mid-40s, I worked retail in the 90s and older pricing guns often used a raised · rather than one aligned with the baseline, so I didn't doubt that it might have been common, or even official, in the past, when I read it. Such guns would sometimes have “old style” alignment with the baseline for the numbers¹ too.
The “still in use today” part is quite definitely wrong though.
----
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numeral_variations#Old-...
“10^6” in the corner, and are marked “ten million dollars.”
Being a factor of ten off when writing out such a common SI prefix as Mega is a bit impressive.
Not to mention, 99^6 = 941,480,149,401 ≠ 99,000,000 (which TFA also quotes). But who's to say notation didn't degrade along with the rest of society? :^)
Probably designed by one of those young whippersnappers who never used a slide rule and confused 10^6 with 10e6, because that is how you enter big numbers on a calculator.
I think the idea is that in the financial world of 2100, when on currency, 10⁶ should be read as short-hand for 10E6, not 1E6.
Thus, 99⁶ should be interpreted as 99E6, hence 99 million, as the author says.
We know already that SI isn't universally followed. As a rough comparison, if a food item contains 160 calories, we know that's 160 kilocalories - and calorie isn't an SI unit. Or, 1GB of RAM is often 1024^3 bytes, with relatively fewer people using GiB.
Given that 99^6 is supposed to mean 99,000,000, it seem clear that the superscript is not meant to be exponentiation but rather just denote the number of zeroes following (ie. short for scientific notation à la the 99e6 syntax used in programming languages.)
Impressing how much detail went into things nearly all viewers never see.
For sure! But just because you don’t “see” it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a huge impact on the feel of the movie, your impression of the characters, and on the storytelling, which is ultimately why these “invisible” decisions were made :)
Funnily enough, one of the viewers is my 3yo son. For the last few days, he's been watching it from the beginning every night at dinner time.
That's the beauty of this masterpiece
The book (<https://typesetinthefuture.com/2018/12/11/book/>) is a fun read, too! I think it was David Plotz who said "read more books with pictures." Interviews, gorgeous looking, and does a good job showing the whole world you can miss by just watching a movie once (or even twice) without really seeing everything. It gives a good sense, too, of how movies first create the standards for "future" and then proceed to subvert or reference those standards.
I second the book recommendation. It's great.
Thank you for recommendation, just bought one.
Really nice article!
I'm not sure about the poster though. This is not necessarily communist, as this was just the style of propaganda posters of all kinds, that came up in the first half of the 20th century.
Personally, it reminds me more of a Nazi poster for the army, which includes tanks that look similar to these robots: https://c8.alamy.com/compde/r90frb/ss-freiwilligen-panzer-gr...
BnL uses the exact same typeface and color scheme as real-world retail giant Costco Wholesale Corporation.
Made my whole day, fantastic.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this - so well done and thought out
I really enjoyed this
I just love the immersion that articles like these provide
The article's title really downplays how much terrific cultural analysis there is here. This write-up has great depth, not only on typography but also architecture, art styles, film, and music! Many links and reference images, too.
A worthwhile read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
It's funny how big of a difference perspective makes. I think this is a neat portrayal of how differently designers and engineers reason about design topics.
I was surprised to see an article about type that didn't involve code editors so heavily upvoted on HN, but as soon as I read the first few paragraphs, I realized why-- it was clearly written by an engineer that has learned a lot about design, and not a designer. There's nothing wrong with that! It's a cool and very well-researched design history deep dive that explores the network of references and roots of the type used, how it was used as a storytelling element, and that sort of thing.
If this was written by a type designer, they'd have been discussing very different things-- why the letterform shapes hit like they do, what design problems they solve, the conceptual and emotional references these shapes make rather than which concrete symbols they relate to, the general rounded square shapes, their negative space, how the lack of stroke contrast makes it hit differently than similar less uniform characters, kerning concerns, etc.
For example, here's Matthew Carter-- one of the more famous type designers-- digging into some of the more unusual type design he's done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RojKQ-w9zn8&t=745s
The person that wrote this article knows a lot more about how this type is used from a modern art perspective, but there's a difference between knowing art history and being able to wield the underlying principles to work with these things as an artist or designer. I think a good example of this is film fans that spend a lot of time on TV Tropes an the like, which are rather like informal film critics. That knowledge is a base requirement for great critical analysis, but if I needed to hire someone to create a film, I'd favor an undergrad film student that was in diapers when the film fan started digging into TV Tropes. Why? It's just a fundamentally different way of reasoning about the same thing. The fan is more concerned with the "whats" and "whens", and the student is more concerned with the "hows", and that gives each of them have a totally different perspective on the "whys". I think creators need to watch out with this. Especially in the nerdier genres, if they're so focused on the film itself that they disregard factors like context and overall story continuity, watching that film is a meaningfully worse experience because they're often more invested in the universe/characters/etc. than they are with the making any give story arc or character pop for a given movie. On the other hand, if we hand too much control to the people primarily interested in the context and story continuity at the expense of any individual film's story and artistic value... well... have you seen the Star Wars prequels?
Back to the article, I could see someone without education in type design reading this article getting the impression that they understand the typographical elements in this film. They definitely understand how the typography was used, but that's a lot different than being able to reason about these things like designers do. A more concrete example would be an in-depth article about the cars in the fast and furious movies, complete with the cultural references of each modification and the purposes they serve. It would be cool and informative, but it wouldn't bring the reader any closer to being an auto designer.
A lot of developers, in particular, get annoyed when I push back against their misconceptions about design. It's not an insult-- it's just not their area of expertise. Usually, they don't know enough about it to realize how little they know about it-- like anybody else with any deep topic they don't know. I've heard designers that have cargo-culted tutorial code into some wordpress plugin spew absolute nonsense about everything from data structures to network architecture with the confidence of someone that just got accepted to a prestigious CS doctoral program. That said, it's easier for non-technical people to see that they don't understand software development because it's easy to see they don't understand the terse error messages, stack traces, code syntax, terminology, etc. It's more difficult in the other direction. Visual design, broadly, is visual communication; for a design to be good, at a bare minimum, it must present cohesive messages or ideas to its intended audience. Many things that look the simplest while still solving all of their goals were the most difficult to make-- you can tell when non-designers copy it because it might look simple, but it probably doesn't effectively communicate everything it needs to-- and that's every bit as true for UI design as it is branding and identity design, and poster design. The complexity in that process is only apparent if you've tried to solve difficult, specific communication problems with a bunch of real-world constraints, grappled with the semiotics, tried to make it stand out, etc. etc. etc. and then had it torn apart by people who've done it a lot longer than you. I can see why someone that doesn't understand what's happening under the hood thinks a designer's main job is making things attractive, like an amateur interior decorator. In reality, that's not even always a requirement-- it often is a natural result of properly communicating your message. What we do is more akin to interior architecture: the functionality comes first. So the next time you see someone suggesting something like allowing custom color themes to your app to "improve UX," maybe consider consulting an experienced UI or UX designer to see what they think. If their suggestions revolve around making it prettier or hiding everything behind menus because functionality is ugly, I conceptually owe you a beer.
I am getting the book. But is there a pdf version somewhere? (I wish physical books would just come with a pdf version)
Jsjsjrendndn
The title of the submission should be changed to “Type in Wall·E”, “Typesetting in Wall·E”, or “Typography in Wall·E”; the word “typeset” is a verb or past participle, not a noun.
The interpunct is still in use today [...] decimal point [...] dot product [...] separate titles, names, and positions
Some·times it is it al·so seen
To cla·ri·fy the way
That syl·la·bles and me·ter meet
In things we say to·day
Which ex·tends from hea·vy use
In pla·ces not so mer·ry
For proof of this phen·o·men·on
Con·sult a dic·tion·ary
In my opinion dystopianess is transported, the more you hold the now as contrast against the old. Take bladerunner- the presence of mechanical animals -the holograms of greenery, the presence of once beautiful buildings (like the Bradburry) held against a industrial produced, soulless item, highlights the decay and despair.
In this case, a caligraphy font https://www.1001fonts.com/calligraphy-fonts.html used, ocassionally on real signs, would be a great way to show the road into the dystopia.
The Hello Dolly footage servers + trinkets serves a similar function.
I wouldnt care about the money but i would care about the credits.
Fun fact: long credits at the end of the movie were invented by George Lucas for American Graffiti in 1973 [1]. He didn't have the money to pay everyone so he offered to put their names in the credits instead.
And thus started a new chapter in the exploitation of film crews, where you don't get paid enough but hey, at least your name is in the credits. All the other producers were immediately like -- that's a genius idea to pay the crew less! So now all movies (and even TV shows) are full of hundreds and often even thousands of names in the credits.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069704/trivia/
I'm always amazed by how long video game credits got over the years.
I'm glad to see people recognized for their work, even in such a small way though. As they continue to scroll and you start to see titles like "2nd assistant to the HR Team Lead" I can't help but wonder how much is bloat and how much improved the games might be if the teams were leaner.
I'm also torn on the concept of "production babies" which is basically just acknowledging that some parent was forced to abandon their family and newborn child for weeks-months of crunch because of bullshit arbitrary release schedules
That's amazing. I always wondered about watching old (1930s-1950s) movies where they would give credits to the lead cast at the start and just end with a "The End" card with no credits. I always wondered if they just cut the credits off, but I guess they never existed!
I'm just glad they stopped putting so many opening credits in films. It's basically insufferable to watch old movies with 10+minutes of opening credits. I'm annoyed by the 3-5 minutes of production credits at the start of movies today as it is.
I still remember my first credit in a blockbuster production, after a first few years in TV advertising that name no names, and it was exhilarating. My name is since forever embedded into the artwork we all worked towards. I was also paid, but with that money now long gone I just wanted to highlight that there is value not just in money.
Didn’t know the Lucas angle, but yeah you’ll see the accounting team listed in a Marvel movie these days.
Per user/seat, so if they were honorable about it, it's probably a decent amount.
Would this be more than 100 seats? $2000 is still not a lot. Would you theoretically need a license for every employee involved in the movie or only those which would actually work with the font?
This man has created six hundred fonts...!