How to make your text look futuristic (2016)

367 points48 comments15 hours ago
swiftcoder

I love just how dated some of these futuristic fonts now seem, having grown up with most of them

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socalgal2

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"

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p0w3n3d

In 2016 to make text look futuristic it would require using — (m dash) a lot, and maybe …

dhosek

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?).

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giancarlostoro

Needs a (2016)

> 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

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genghisjahn

And then there is the papyrus font for avatar…

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Animats

Somewhere, an LLM trained on this and can now produce cliche future fonts.

Is the Trajan fad over yet?[1]

[1] https://letterboxd.com/sethpaul/list/trajan-the-typeface-tha...

bhaak

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.

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riffraff

Typeset in the future was awesome, too bad it stopped updating

fredley

Almost exactly the playbook I followed (unwittingly) when designing a logotype for my Playdate game recently:

https://play.date/games/hyper-vector/

efitz

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.

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xiaoyu2006

A genuinely fun post.

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jonhohle

Missing The Terminator. Also applies to Wipeout, a game with some of my favorite logo and design work.

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baigy

> the devastating Kern Wars of 2067

Do we know who won those wars?

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harimau777

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!

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booleandilemma

My first thought was "that's just the star trek font".

bigethan

this is exactly the ESPN logo as well

sosomoxie

Ironically (I’m sure with intent). This looks super 80s.

mproud

Very tongue-in-cheek

holotherapper

Futura Free

keyle

    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.

QuercusMax

This should have a (2016)

timebeforeland

Is this a joke..?

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