I didn't notice a single stereotypical space/future font in there. Lots of Helvetica and suchlike, plus a few display typefaces in spots where it makes sense to use a display typeface. And, of course, a bunch of computer fonts that look retro-futuristic now, but would have just been all they had to work with, because that sort of styling was what you had to do to make text legible on a vintage 1979 low DPI CRT display.

Alien was made in the 70s and at the time and was set in some time in the distant future. What fonts were we using back then? Will we be using the same fonts hundreds of years in the future? What fonts were the people in the setting using?

On top of that, part of the draw of sci-fi is to imagine a new, different world. That includes different fonts.

We weren't using fonts at all. Graphic design was done with stick-on lettering, not with computers. The type catalogs of the day offered a fairly typical selection of the styles used.

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.

One thing that comes to mind is freeway sign fonts in the US. They have recently started to change and I certainly don't like the new ones as well as the old ones. But, maybe that's just my human emotions avoiding change.

Don't worry, they'll be changing back. https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/4/10919686/clearview-highway...

Designing a new font is a hard job, not something you just slap together for a movie. Even big corporations who want a custom font will generally hire a designer who bases it on something they've done before.

Interestingly, there's a font designed (relatively recently) for air traffic control use, where misreading glyphs can be catastrophic. I tried it as a terminal font.

It is awful.

> I tried it as a terminal font. It is awful.

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).

Yes, but I had initially thought that the selection pressures would be similar enough, particularly around disambiguation, that good for one would be good for the other. Either that was untrue, or... they didn't do the design particularly well.

Yup, entirely possible. I haven't used it myself.

Can you remember the name of this font?

I had misremembered. It's not for air traffic control, but for aircraft cockpits. It's this: https://b612-font.com/

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.

Trivia: B-612 is the name of the asteroid home of the Little Prince of the eponymous story. That name is derived from the name of the aircraft flown by author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot.

Makes sense that a cockpit wouldn't need a clear distinction between brackets and parenthesis, or |. But I am surprised about the similarity of 0 and O. I recall when I went to the ATC academy they really drilled in using a horizontal slash through zeros when hand-written. Also had to underline the letter S in any case where it could be ambiguous with the number 5 (as in a plane's tail number). I think we also had to put a horizontal strike through the letter Z to distinguish it from a 2.

Probably more important in an ATC context than a flight deck setting. Tail numbers come to mind, as you said. Although I could see Part 91 operators mixing up airport identifiers with O and 0, airlines don't fly to airports where that matters... intersections and navaids are all alpha... approach names aren't going to have any ambiguity... so I guess one could argue it's ok? Still, you're right, it was a weird choice not to disambiguate them.

(Also, I'm super jealous you went to the ATC academy. By the time I seriously considered it, I'd aged out.)

Yeah sure...

"Can you make it look more futuristic? We're building a mining spaceship colony and it must attract the investors"

Well, then, make sure it has an iPod interface and lots of cup holders.

I expect they will be cost-effective conglomerates of many manufacturers, possibly refitted multiple times. They may likely be a pastiche of decades of decisions about fonts and styles!

The Corporation has decided that disembodied brains don't need fonts of any kind in order to perform their required function.

If SpaceX has anything to say about it, it'll be Lato.

Let's hope nothing safety-critical depends on being able to tell the difference between the l and the I.