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At the 1996 ATypI meeting in Den Haag, one of the speakers coined the term “sterotypography” to refer to certain cliches that get used in type usage. Another case of this is the use of Neuland and Neuland Inline to represent Africa, and of course the assortment of faux Chinese fonts that were ubiquitous on Chinese takeout menus in the 80s and 90s (and probably still are, but are there still takeout menus in the era of Grubhub?).
Walk into a super market, every product is giving you non textual clues as to what it is, and why it's different from the identical thing right next to it.
You notice the odd ones out because you have to stop and work out what the thing is.
Edit. An example is spreadable 'butter', in the UK and Europe you can't say it's butter, it doesn't say it's butter, but I bet most people have never noticed that because it's in butter type packaging with the design language you'd expect.
Does the Back To The Future logo really count? Raiders of the Lost Ark as a very similar style but does not evoke "future". Yes, there are subtle differences. My point is, if you divorced them from the connection to their content I think it would be hard to point to one as "future" and the other as "not future"
The Raiders connection is actually documented — same era of designers cycling through similar visual vocabularies. The "future" reading comes almost entirely from context.
The typeface could not be more different between the two. One is a sans serif font with many of the factors the author called out. The other calls back to hand illustration and comics IMO.
What is the same is the color scheme and gradient. This likely is more about what was in style at the time for movie posters. You can also justify this is representive of the past part of back to the future.
Great read otherwise, I know the author mentions their book, I do wonder if he covers the history of how these fonts came to be so standard... for future stuff
As someone who has read the book, it does go through the history and inspiration of modern sci-fi typeset. Great coffee table book. Mainly expands on the articles on the website with more details and graphics.
He just... highlighted Avatar. He clicked the dropdown menu, and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a...Like a thoughtless child just wandering by a garden, just yanking leaves along the way.
Given the name you'd think it would be an alternative for Microgramma, but no, no - just look at the internal corners on letters like N, W, and V. In Microgramma they'd be flattened off but in Michroma and Eurostile they come to a point.
I dunno, it’s kinda futuristic, but it’s missing the faux 3d effect where it appears to have warped up close to you and left a trail of light behind it, like the Star Trek example of the end. Nothing says “future” like fake 3d effects.
FWIW, ST:TNG only used the faux 3D effect for the season that aired on the year of Star Trek’s 25th anniversary. Subsequent seasons reverted to the 2d text.
I kind of wish they had used something other than Eurostyle for the starting font in their example since it is already a font that has become associated with sci-fi.
Still a great article though! More of this please!
