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
JK-Swizzle•May 12, 2026
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.
giancarlostoro•May 12, 2026
Might have to snag it, and like you say, keep it laying around as a coffee table book somewhere. :)
bit_savager•May 12, 2026
"Somewhere"
xiaoyu2006•May 12, 2026
A genuinely fun post.
ctippett•May 12, 2026
I agree! A refreshing interlude to the cybersecurity postmortems and corporate layoff news.
riffraff•May 12, 2026
Typeset in the future was awesome, too bad it stopped updating
timebeforeland•May 12, 2026
Is this a joke..?
dylan604•May 12, 2026
only if you don't get it
Animats•May 12, 2026
Somewhere, an LLM trained on this and can now produce cliche future fonts.
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.
harimau777•May 12, 2026
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!
We want it to look like the text is stretching towards 2020
Sigh, if only :|
Who knew back then that we'd go from less design to no design at all produced by machines.
booleandilemma•May 12, 2026
My first thought was "that's just the star trek font".
sosomoxie•May 13, 2026
Ironically (I’m sure with intent). This looks super 80s.
bhaak•May 13, 2026
Funny. I just googled this site 2 hours ago for a font inspiration for a makerspace logo.
Michroma is a Google Font alternative for Eurostile.
ErroneousBosh•May 13, 2026
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.
mproud•May 13, 2026
Very tongue-in-cheek
dhosek•May 13, 2026
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?).
benj111•May 13, 2026
We use this sort of short hand all the time.
There's "ye olde" in a gothic font.
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.
baigy•May 13, 2026
> the devastating Kern Wars of 2067
Do we know who won those wars?
mikestorrent•May 13, 2026
To be honest I've had a lot of difficulty telling the two sides apart
marcosdumay•May 13, 2026
From the result there, looks like each faction got to keep some terrain.
jamonserrano•May 13, 2026
Had the other side won, we would know them as the Kem Wars.
mrexroad•May 13, 2026
Revenge is a typeface best served with Serifs
Keeeeerrrrrrrrrrrnnn!!
bigethan•May 13, 2026
this is exactly the ESPN logo as well
jonhohle•May 13, 2026
Missing The Terminator. Also applies to Wipeout, a game with some of my favorite logo and design work.
I like how the first like made the entire mobile browser go yellow, even the buttons. How did they do that?
socalgal2•May 13, 2026
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"
BoredPositron•May 13, 2026
The future always has context.
efitz•May 13, 2026
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.
mrexroad•May 13, 2026
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.
fredley•May 13, 2026
Almost exactly the playbook I followed (unwittingly) when designing a logotype for my Playdate game recently:
23 Comments
> Posted on February 18, 2016 by Dave Addey
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
Is the Trajan fad over yet?[1]
[1] https://letterboxd.com/sethpaul/list/trajan-the-typeface-tha...
Papyrus on the big screen 'til mid-to-late 2030s.
Still a great article though! More of this please!
Who knew back then that we'd go from less design to no design at all produced by machines.
Michroma is a Google Font alternative for Eurostile.
There's "ye olde" in a gothic font.
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.
Do we know who won those wars?
Keeeeerrrrrrrrrrrnnn!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Designers_Republic
https://play.date/games/hyper-vector/