#Hal 9000 graphic series

There’s no mistaking Eurostile Bold Extended on the receptionist’s language buttons when the Doctor arrives on the space station. In a subsequent close-up, we see that the craft also features the IBM logo in its pre-1972 version, set in City Medium, as designed by Paul Rand:

#Hal 9000 graphic series

And why not? After all, the 9000 series has a perfect operational record. Presumably the Pan Am craft are also controlled by HAL-series computers.

The Pan Am spacecraft’s flight deck gives us our first sighting of Eurostile Bold Extended, in an ominous foreshadowing of the HAL 9000 interface screens we’ll see later on. (We’ll gloss over the fact that Pan Am went bust in 1991.) The cabin crew have, however, adopted Velcro Grip Shoes to counter the weightlessness of space: In the first of several subtle inclusions of real-world American companies, we discover that the Pan Am logo hasn’t changed much between 19. Floyd on his Pan Am flight to Space Station 5. So, let’s skip forward a little, and join Dr. The dawn of man is definitely not set in the future, as indicated by its use of Albertus for the act’s title card:Īfter introducing us to Albertus, the Dawn Of Man turns out to be typographically unremarkable. The film’s opening act is set during The Dawn Of Man. Perhaps surprisingly, the zeroes in ‘2001’ appear to be set with the Gill Sans capital letter O (shown below on the left), rather than its zero character (shown on the right): This title card is set in Gill Sans, one of the all-time classic sans-serif fonts. Right from the opening scene, we’re treated to Kubrick’s love of bold, clean, sans-serif typography: 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece – seems an appropriate place to start a blog about typography in sci-fi. Amongst other delights, it offers a zero-gravity toilet, emergency resuscitations, exploding bolts, and product placement aplenty. It’s also the Ur Example of Eurostile Bold Extended’s regular appearance in spacecraft user interfaces.