Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!kibo
From: kibo@jec311.its.rpi.edu (James 'Kibo' Parry)
Subject: Re: Star Trek, the font generation
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Organization: Emerson College (Boston), formerly RPI (Troy, NY)
References: <1991Apr19.034051.10491@cica.indiana.edu> <1991Apr19.174610.19644@newsserver.sfu.ca> <15102@life.ai.mit.edu>
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Date: 20 Apr 91 06:58:12 GMT
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In article <15102@life.ai.mit.edu> cbwood@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Clifton B. Woo
d) writes:

>At any rate, Crillee wasn't exactly what I was looking for. For an example
>of Microgramma (or Microgamma, etc.) look at the typeset they use to stencil
>the names of the Ships on the hull or the names of the type of station.

Microgramma Bold Extended is the ship-name font; it's rather different
from plain Microgramma (33% wider and twice as dark, approximately.  I
digitized it once for someone.)    Be sure to get the right font in the
family, if you're a real Trekkist :-)

Eurostile is the same as Microgramma (the designer, Novarese, redrew it--
the difference is that Eurostile has lowercase.)  Eurostile is also
available in Bold Extended.

Crillee is used in the credits of The Next Generation, as you said.

For a lot of the interior ship stuff in The Next Generation they've been
using Helvetica Condensed.  I think it's a better choice than the
Microgramma family  to be used in the context of a future setting, because
Microgramma already looks rather dated (50s/60s).  Of course,
Microgramma was contemporary-looking when the original Trek was done.

Similarly, the custom font the use for the movie titles has a seventies
look to it, probably because the first movie was filmed in the 70s.  The
logo for The Next Generation is derived from Stop, a typeface that's
been around a while but is now becoming incredibly overused in logos
that want to look high-tech;  in a few years designers like me will be
looking at The Next Generation and saying "oh, that logo is so
late-eighties-looking", I'll wager.

Stop and Yagi Double were also used extensively for Battlestar
Galactica.  Since you say you're interested in other "science fiction"
fonts,  and I stare at the fonts when I watch science fiction, here are
some others worth mentioning:

Futura Black (a stencil-like font derived from condensed Futura.)  It
was used in the first season Space:1999 titles, the Buckaroo Banzai
titles, and many other things.  I don't know why people consider it
futuristic-looking; to me it seems rather Art Deco or Bahaus.  (It's
about fifty years old now, and is--I think--one of the best
solid-looking fonts.)

Baby Teeth and Sinaloa are also often used for futuristic-looking
letters; they're both extremely simplified, solid black capitals (Baby
Teeth has a single white notch in most characters; Sinaloa has racing
stripes.)  They, like the others I mention, can be found in a
Letraset catalog.


One of my pet projects is to design some lettering that looks like how
*I* think alphabets will be simplified in the future (which, of course,
differs from how people like Paul Renner and so on have done simplified
alphabets, because it's a very personal opinion.)  A major catch is that
it depends on what context the font will be used in; a dystopian police
state might like very standard block letters, all caps (say Futura or
Helvetica) while an artistically-oriented leisure society might go for
more humanistic, flowing scripts.  So far I've come up with a few
predictions for fonts for the far future, and my sketches have been
sufficiently weird-looking to keep me from wanting to ever use them :-)
They have provided inspiration for other projects, though.

If you're designing the look of a world for a science fiction show or
film, it makes sense to me that you'd want to hire someone to draw some
original lettering--not only would you have more control over the look
of the world, but you'd also avoid having something that looked 20s,
30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s... (after all, you wouldn't put a
chair designed in 1985 in a room that needs 24th-century furniture,
would you?)

I think the most successful--in terms of imaginative design that's not
dated--is the numbering on the cars in Blade Runner.  Very odd-looking,
distorted letters, but with digitized stairsteps in them 9the jaggies
keep the warped letters from looking 60s.)  Note, though, that the
titles of Blade Runner were set in Goudy Old Style, which conveys a very
old-fashioned, classy impression which I feel was quite inappropriate.


-- 

James "Kibo" Parry       kibo@rpi.edu
132 Beacon St. #213, Boston, MA 02116
(617) 262-3922
