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.

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.

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.

> 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

I still remember this golden article from that same site:

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

    While he’s doing so, there’s a dramatic…
 
    COMPUTER MALFUNCTION

    …in the hibernation pods, which causes the life support
    machines of the hibernating science crew to start reporting…

    LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL

    …and end up with their…

    LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED

    …which isn’t what they wanted AT ALL.

    Still: if it is going to happen, it may as well happen in what is 
    probably Univers 67 Bold Condensed.

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.

"A Wuppertal Schwebebahn monorail train arrives at the Werther Brücke station in Wuppertal, 1913."

Somewhat off topic, but stuff like this always leads me back to this reconstructed video from 1902. It feels like you almost there. I cannot fantom all these people walking peacefully now are dead, and they never heard of silicon circuit, let alone internet or an iPad. Worth watching once or twice a year it always makes me appreciate my life just few inches more...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQfPyx_678g

Impressing how much detail went into things nearly all viewers never see.

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 just love the immersion that articles like these provide

aside: WALL-E's story is strangely analogous to the mystic journey of a seer. This includes the precise steps of (a) isolation (b) love (c) rejection (d) hero's voyage (e) androgyny (c.f. WALL-E in the space ship), (f) spiritual fight, (g) the 'kiss' (h) the 'return' (j) union and establishment of a new earthly life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

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.

I am getting the book. But is there a pdf version somewhere? (I wish physical books would just come with a pdf version)

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this - so well done and thought out

I really enjoyed this

A very interesting and enjoyable article.

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.

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.

> “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.