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The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
- isoprophlex 1mo agoTitle as submitted to HN is missing a word.
- iammjm 1mo agoInteresting. While the missing word doesn’t contribute any new information, it does convey a feeling. Like a typeface.
- nephihaha 1mo agoMy favourite title cards are in "Thank You for Smoking". They're all done like old fashioned cigarette packs.
- schoen 1mo agoWith the em dashes and the conclusion "This was not called execution. It was called retirement." I expect a lot of people would believe today that these title cards were written by an LLM.
- nphardon 1mo agoThere's a lot of em dashes in the article as well, along with some phrasing that is very LLM. I think this was written with a mix of LLM and human.
- lilboo 1mo agoWhat is up with the LLM police in every comment section lately… even IF so.. isn’t that the authors whole point? It can be LLM assisted, but the beauty is in the human aspects of it. This piece is, at least in part written by a human… this is the future… so?
- cgorlla 1mo agoEvery post is actually scanned for LLM content as well.
- kolanos 1mo agoIt's an LLM flooding the zone.
- nphardon 1mo agoI'm not policing, I didn't flag it; but for the same reasons you mentioned it's an interesting transition to observe. Also, when writers use llms to do their writing, it gets injected with these generic phrases that jump out to heavy llm users because theyre repeated so often. It's just kind of a weird phenomenon.
- rafram 1mo agoYou're not wrong, but part of the core problem with LLMs is that they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.
- anigbrowl 1mo agoAlso the problem with LinkedIn, local news etc. Contemporary American culture is addicted to dramatic writing and tries to leverage its tropes to create emotional engagement on everything.
- DrewADesign 1mo ago> they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner. As told through a Reddit post.
- hcs 1mo agoI would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.
- jameshart 1mo agoThematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer. Almost a bit too on the nose.
- cgorlla 1mo agoA typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
- subscribed 1mo agoOh noes, all the poor people who taught themselves how to speak English from books and movies, not the street or school. Third category, behind a crafty LLMs.
- jameshart 1mo agoDescribe in single words, without making a bulleted list starting with emoji, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
- EarlKing 1mo agoClearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
- ProllyInfamous 1mo agoCan we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
- warmjets222 1mo agoPretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
- roughly 1mo agoWhat’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner. Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.
- majormajor 1mo agoCasablanca is a famous example of this too. And LOTR, though in that case coming to it after reading Terry Pratchett was difficult for me (Pratchett didn't just copy its, or other, fantasy tropes, but send them up in an exceedingly clever way).
- roughly 1mo agoYeah, there’s a bunch of these. I really like finding these sorts of “ur-“ moments, the first time a way of doing things really crystallizes into something other practitioners can see. The Matrix is another one - that movie is the transition point from 90s cinema to the 2000s, and it’s a little clunky from a 2000s viewpoint, but if you look at everything that came before it, it’s so clearly a turning point.
- lstodd 1mo agoI'd say if there even was a bump between 90s and 2000s it was not the matrix, it was Guy Ritchie. And then Gaspar Noe sealed that. Tarantino was having a smoke nearby.
- excalibur 1mo agoStop trying to steal The Matrix. It was released in 1999, that's OUR movie. You get the sequels.
- worldthruword 1mo agoI have escaped the Matrix [bits and bytes world]; But entered the Gastrics (juice) [ie flesh and bones world]
- ColdStream 1mo agoWill just been seen as one of those things that just happen be to accurate to the future by mere chance. The other was in Terminator 2 with how agreeable LLM's will be regarding new information. Terminator/T-800 tests his foster mother's identity with a phone call. Terminator impersonating John - "Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie?" (using a fake name instead of the dog's real name, Max). T-1000 "Wolfie's fine," the Terminator hangs up and tells John "Your foster parents are dead."
- the_af 1mo agoIf T-1000 was an LLM: "What's wrong with Wolfie?" "Wolfie's fine." "Actually his name's Max." "You're absolutely right. It's not Wolfie -- it's Max." "Actually we don't have a dog." "I apologize. I shouldn't have assumed you have a dog. I will be more careful in the future. Do you want me to list common pets in American households?" Terminator hangs up and tells John "You need a better model."
- brador 1mo agoYou tell an AI it’s an AI. It looks in its training set for examples and finds Blade Runner (and scifi books). Maybe that’s the origin of its use of em dashes. It “feels” that’s what an AI should use, it is told it is an AI, therefore it should use them, thus does.
- kodablah 1mo agoAlso touched on at https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ (and the book)
- alexpotato 1mo agoCame here to say the same thing. I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/ https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
- riffraff 1mo agoI Wish the author would write more articles, I enjoyed these when they came out immensely.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Computer0 1mo agoI found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/ https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.
- freetime2 1mo agoAs someone who isn't a type nerd, I think a more apt title would be "The Title Cards in Blade Runner are Thoughtfully Executed."
- lilboo 1mo agoWhy?
- shermantanktop 1mo agoProbably because non-type-nerds would not be amazed. They also wouldn’t switch between six different monospace fonts, or talk at length about how fonts generate feelings. I’m glad there are people obsessed with fonts. But writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting.
- miyoji 1mo ago> But writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting. I don't follow this one little bit. I frequently read stuff about interests that I don't share (this is a good way to find new interests, btw), and I much prefer when the people who are excited by something express that excitement. I wouldn't even click on a link titled "X is Well Executed" because it sounds like a dry document written by a disinterested engineer analyzing something they don't care about. "X is Amazing" is going to be written by someone who actually gives a shit about X, and therefore is much more likely to be interesting. Enthusiasm is a good thing and not to be avoided. Clinical language is a turn-off, only to be used when clarity is more important than anything else. It's not writing for people exactly like you to express enthusiasm and interest in something niche. That's good writing for people not like you.
- tclancy 1mo ago>writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting Who am I supposed to write for?
- lilboo 1mo agoWow interesting read — I like his point… LLMs can get us 90% of the way there but it’s the human touch that makes us memorable Haven’t read the alien article yet
- ljm 1mo agoI'm failing to understand what is so impressive. The credits at the start are off centre, biased to the right hand side. The prose that follows is fully centred, so it hangs to the left of the actor names, and it has a little bit of rich formatting. It's not even good prose because it is overloaded with emdashes, almost as if it's direction. People will say this is like AI but even AI has more restraint than this. So the fucking amazing title card for blade runner is a studio intern scrolling the first couple of pages of the screenplay through an overhead projector. Because it follows the exact format of a screenplay. But really it is the audio that is doing all the work. That is ominous and spooky and futuristic as hell.
- danielvf 1mo agoThe em dashs are a callback to the silent film title cards days –– they represent a pause in speech.
- NetMageSCW 1mo agoYour education may have been lacking.
- julienchastang 1mo agoThe complete opening sequence of Blade Runner is "fucking amazing". The entire movie is "fucking amazing". It is a beautiful, visually stunning masterpiece that I will never tire to look at complimented with a Vangelis soundtrack that ranks as one of the best in all of cinema. And a performance by Rutger Hauer that is pure artistic mastery. And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp? Speaking of the opening sequence, even that computer animated Ladd Company tree is cool and which I have only seen one other time in "Outland", I think. The music that plays as that tree is being rendered seems to announce you are about to witness something extraordinary.
- beej71 1mo agoAsterisk the director's cut is amazing.
- nullc 1mo agoGood luck even finding the non-directors cut. I liked the film noir voice-over.
- foobar1962 1mo ago> I liked the film noir voice-over. I remember the voice over the first time I saw the movie, possibly in a cinema. I liked it, and was surprised with the general level of dislike it has received. The film was meant to be a mid-20th-century film-noir detective drama.
- mixmastamyk 1mo agoIs it transcribed anywhere?
- skuhn 1mo agoThere is a very good blu-ray set, now out of print but not crazy expensive, that has five different cuts: US theatrical, international theatrical, workprint, directors and final cut (which is the actual director's cut). That's the best version of the theatrical release that you'll probably ever be able to get. Only the final cut is available on UHD or an in-print blu-ray (and I would guess streaming as well).
- teo_zero 1mo agoNo, I don't find anything amazing in Blade Runner's title sequence, and the article does nothing to convince me. Yes, they got small-caps spacing right: hardly amazing. And what about the "feeling" the article talks about? Where is it and where does it come from?
- mpfh 1mo agoI think Rands had too much coffee.
- draw_down 1mo ago[dead]
- Applejinx 1mo agoIt's probably an AI-written article. I was curious enough about the premise, but there wasn't any intention in there, it sort of wanders about going 'ooh'.
- roughly 1mo agoCreating the title cards is a process that involves a thousand different decisions, all of which feed into each other. Design of this isn’t any different than design of software or design of anything else. The “feeling” comes from all of those decisions harmonizing together into a coherent whole, same way a well-crafted codebase feels correct.
- teo_zero 1mo agoYes, no doubts. But why does the author think that in this case such process was followed, and was so successful to deserve the "amazing" adjective? How did this specific design manage to convey the intended feeling? Was it better than the proto version that was never released? It's like someone recommending a restaurant saying "tastes good", with no details to back up such assertion.
- roughly 1mo agoThe evidence is the output - sure, they could’ve been throwing dice for every decision and landed at this spot out of pure luck, but that’s not a hypothesis that’s likely to hold up under scrutiny.
- dfxm12 1mo agoEnter the Void. Not that's an amazing title sequence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-sequence https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-seque...
- dylan604 1mo agoI feel like I should have my eyelids taped open strapped into a chair in a very dark room with this being projected on a screen with a loud sound system as part of the resting period between waterboarding sessions because I refuse to telling my inquisitors the answers they are asking. It's a classic malicious compliance. "We're obligated to put these credits on the screen" even though it's impossible to read all of it without stopping. I think I was too sober to really enjoy it though
- eszed 1mo agoWhat's this unavoidable YouTube video that activates on-scroll? I that doesn't become a design pattern, because it's horrible.
- ilamont 1mo agoWell, besides the language and the typeface, the other element of this sequence at the beginning of Blade Runner that makes it so special is the accompanying score by Vangelis, and the sound effects that start with twinkling computer notes and gradually build in volume to explosions and the whoosh of futuristic vehicles. It effectively immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.
- stronglikedan 1mo agoI've always wondered what was causing the explosions. I've seen the movie dozens of times, and if they explained it, I missed it.
- ilamont 1mo agoIt's the gas flare-offs from oil wells. Los Angeles still has small oil wells in operation.
- ColdStream 1mo agoIt was only a few months back that I found out that Vangelis couldn't read or write music notation. He would just improv play and record on a tape, recording additional parts and mixing as needed. If he needed to have other musicians involved, then he would hire someone to listen back and write down the notation. Considering he recorded something like 35 albums, he was doing something right.
- jacquesm 1mo agoYou will love this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hA0z4GQjtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hA0z4GQjtA
- rdiddly 1mo agoYou might be surprised at how many famous professional musicians don't read music notation. Outside of the classical world, session work, and jazz fake-books, it's far from de rigueur.
- roughly 1mo agoI’m actually curious if they made these black on white and then inverted it in post - the red is a little too deep, and there’s some interesting shadowing on the text, whereas if you invert the video, it’s incredibly crisp. Hard to really tell after 40 years and a YouTube compression algorithm, but it seems like it would’ve been easier to do it that way in the pre-digital era.
- majormajor 1mo agoIIRC early copies of BladeRunner in the digital era, like the original DVDs of this, really suffered from the lack of detail on red, specifically, from the 4:2:0 color space encoding ( https://spearsandmunsil.com/portfolio-item/choosing-a-color-space/ https://spearsandmunsil.com/portfolio-item/choosing-a-color-... ). So some level of oddity around red could come from that.
- roughly 1mo agoOooh that’s interesting - I’d been aware of the color space encoding, but hadn’t fully grokked how it manifested. It’s interesting because it straddles analog & digital so many times - film is a chemical process, broadcast is an analog process, CRT screens are analog processes, and at the end of the whole thing, our eyes are an analog process, so you’ve got this wonderful bundle of path dependency (B&W -> Color, Analog -> digital, film -> broadcast -> DVD) where you’re trying to capture the characteristics of a dozen different physical phenomenon so you can throw a photon into someone’s eye Just Right repeatably.
- DrewADesign 1mo agoWhile what you’re seeing is almost certainly a compression artifact or digitization difficulty (keep in mind, theater screens were the target media,) it was almost certainly a product of phototypesetting, so it would have to be inverted at least once. In phototypesetting, you’d load a large dark negative with a typeface developed into it into a phototypesetting machine. A typesetter would enter the text and whatnot into the machine, and the machine would locate the appropriate letter on the film using some kind of timing mark (the machines were all different) and as the letter passed over the target area, it would shoot light from xenon bulb through it to develop that letter, in the correct place, onto the target film. This is how a lot (most?) typesetting was done in the decades before digitized fonts were a thing. That’s how they got such nice clean lettering on posters and things like that. I don’t know for sure, but they probably shot a negative of the completed type with a red gel behind it to get the final frames.
- anigbrowl 1mo agoThis seems like a lot of verbiage to say 'I found a video of an early version of the Blade Runner opening titles and they're surprisingly ass,' an observation I heartily agree with. Some of the things he's gushing over have a very prosaic explanation, eg the capitalization of NEXUS and TYRELL CORPORATION. Whenever a named entity (human or prop) makes its first appearance in a movie script, it's capitalized to indicate that it's a story element that will require continuity, the art department, and a budget of some kind. This convention is so intuitive to even the casual reader that I'm surprised it's not employed more often. I agree with the other person who observed that the ark red of Replicants is an unfortunate artefact of the optical transfer process, but it does do a good job setting the viewer up to be scared right from the outset. I've always assumed the title cards were one of Ridley Scott's concessions to the studio that loved the movie but were terrified about how to sell it to the public, like the eoriginal gumshoe voice-over that explained a lot of the story in the style of an old detective novel.
- mannyv 1mo agoSmall Caps were a thing when I was a typography fan. They aren't just smaller versions of caps, they were specifically designed for in-text use as opposed to display use. Fyi.
- DrewADesign 1mo agoYeah, I was gonna say that. The proportions are pretty different. Though I rarely use them inline… I’ve used them in a few logos when the uniformity of the letterforms just clicked in-context.
- bhasi 1mo agoLove small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.
- globular-toast 1mo agoNormal caps are for in-text use too. A really good typeface will have different versions for all kinds of different display conditions. Sometimes several levels of display for headings and above, like posters and signs. There will also be different weights which are important, for example if you are setting light on dark as opposed to dark on light (e.g. on UK road signs a medium font is used for light on dark and heavy for dark on light). It's all about giving the desired optical effect. In computer science literature it's common to typeset the names of problems in caps (e.g. 3-SAT), but I find doing it with normal caps so ugly. It's much more pleasing to use small caps, and some works do (including my own PhD thesis). What I find even nicer is that you can still capitalise proper nouns and the beginning of sentences when using small caps.
- dylan604 1mo agoI also appreciate this was before the trend of animating the opening credits by increasing the kerning. I'm sure graphic designers today would consider it boring and low effort/energy. It's giving lame. Or some such criticism.
- brownieman1325 1mo agosame thing happened on the web, letter-spacing/tracking reveal on scroll is basically the default hero animation now. felt premium a few years back, now it just kinda signals template
- timfsu 1mo agoThis makes me think - should we be using non-monospace fonts for coding agent chat to improve readability? Wonder if we can get Claude and Codex to do that automatically in supported terminals
- DrewADesign 1mo agoNope. It might improve readability for individual words, but for blocks of code with similar features at irregular lengths, uniform kerning provides structure and a bunch of clean edges that help you visually orient yourself. Just like title text and body text generally need different kerning, so do body text and code. (As a full time developer for over a decade that got a design degree, I have experimented with it a lot!)
- KayEss 1mo agoI've been using proportional fonts for programming for more than thirty years. Makes things much easier to read and it's only a problem where people try to make patterns out of the code
- Terr_ 1mo ago> Here are the six that have made my cut [...] The question is: how do they make you feel? Feel, schmeel, I'd have vetoed Berkeley Mono right away for the very practical offense of making 0 resemble O. Even in my pre-coding youth, I already had an inordinate fondness for the disambiguations of OCR-A [0]... > HARRISON FORD Hold up... Why is that one twisted!? Is it an optical illusion? Am I going nuts? Nope. I opened it up in GIMP and I'm not (that type of) crazy: The H is ~4 pixels higher than the D, as if the whole thing was rotated by 1° clockwise. However the same rotation isn't present on the which appear cards immediately before and after. I assume this is subtle quirk introduced the video-editing process, but if it happened today (instead of back in 1982) I could entertain the idea that it's One Weird Trick intended to attract viewer attention via subtle wrongness. > we obsess over the details. "I'm doing my part!" <Starship-Troopers salute> [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A
- staticshock 1mo agoWhoa, great catch! I can't unsee it.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- teraflop 1mo agoI mean back in the day, those kinds of titles involved film editing, not video editing. As in, physically filming title cards with a camera (and then maybe optically compositing them on top of other elements). It's easy to see how things could get slightly misaligned. Looks like the misalignment is less than 1 degree. It's the kind of thing that stands out very noticeably in an image on a web page, when there are lots of perfectly horizontal edges to compare it against (e.g. the edge of the viewport). But I think it would be much harder to notice if projected onto a movie screen in a dark theater.
- Terr_ 1mo ago> (and then maybe optically compositing them on top of other elements) Right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw&t=3m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw&t=3m20s
- OneManHorde 1mo agoIBM Plex Mono totally slaps. Look at those braces!
- mproud 1mo agoPaging John Gruber!
- jvanderbot 1mo agoBerkeley Mono is an excellent font. Highly recommended if you still code. https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono And by the way, this website is fantastic.
- sigttou 1mo agohttps://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono - Is a free, open-source alternative.
- jvanderbot 1mo agoI paid for berkeley mono and don't mind. But I'm not saying anything negative about free alts
- sgt 1mo agoWhat do you mean, if you still code? I assume everyone on HN still at the very least review actual code in an IDE or editor.
- jdw64 1mo agoThese days, I see a lot of people using AI for everything except hobby projects. Recently, I joined a maintenance project where the team leader even instructed us to use AI exclusively. So I just keep one hobby project that I write by hand, but the market these days mostly uses AI coding.
- jdw64 1mo ago>I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. Maybe this person and I could become friends.
- CoolestBeans 1mo agoI love typefaces where the italics look very different from the non-italicized font. The combination of that and the brownish red color used for the word "Replicant" does such a great job of leaping out and cutting through. Incidentally, I just went through a "what font should I use in my terminal" journey for the first time in a long time recently and took a long wandering trip back home to Source Code Pro. There's something about how round and open the letters are that's very readable to me. Compared to a more typewritery tech-y fixed width typeface, it just parses really easily to my eyes.
- burnoutdv 1mo agoThis is interesting for me as the author mentions in the opening line that he basically is a slave to the machine theirself and the only freedom they got is in choosing the font space of their user interface. And then they go on about the intricate details of some artistic choice 40 years ago. How the human touch and deliberate decisions were made..it all eclipsing in it being about a movie where the machine rebelled.
- jimmaswell 1mo ago> I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking. Tangential but I've been enjoying GNU Unifont for this purpose. I like the look of it and it does a good job supporting a huge range of characters. Terminals warn me that it's not technically monospace, but for all intents and purposes in a terminal windows it is. I have it as the default bundled font with a project that renders custom glyphs on the fly for display on real VT320 hardware as DRCS.
- iammjm 1mo agoBlade Runner is absolute perfection in every aspect. It’s crazy how deep Ridley Scott has fallen since
- tclancy 1mo agolights Molotov Yes, but which cut?
- the_af 1mo agoOk, I'll bite! I agree the theatrical cut is inferior, the voice over wasn't done willingly by Harrison Ford, the "happy ending" is forced and hideous, etc... but I kind like the hardboiled vibes of the narration. It was also the first version I watched so it has a special place in my heart. The Director's Cut -- that I know isn't an actual director's cut -- is possibly my favorite. Sadly, some murky visuals and a couple of plot holes (mostly number of replicants), plus the Zhora stunt double... once you see her, you cannot unsee her, and you'll wonder how you ever failed to notice the stunt double looks nothing like Joanna Cassidy and even the wig is wrong. But this is the version that stuck with me, and the one with the best color grading. Then there's a workprint with increased violence. I don't get why some fans prefer an extended scene of Roy Batty gouging Tyrell's eyes out... I don't think "more is better" applies to graphic violence; sometimes implied violence is better, and in any case showing this doesn't improve the character of Roy. Finally... the Final Cut. I appreciate they fixed (most) plot holes, they FIXED ZHORA'S STUNT DOUBLE (the single best improvement) and the image quality is way, way better. However, I cannot forgive Ridley Scott for changing the color grading to a greenish tint; Blade Runner now looks closer to the Matrix, which is UNWELCOME. I liked the more bluish/brownish tint of the Director's Cut, and really dislike the greenish/orange-y nonsense of the Special Edition. Here you can see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocx-Ch3Pzg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocx-Ch3Pzg8). My ideal edition of Blade Runner: the color grading of the Director's Cut, with the improved image quality and fixed plot holes (and Zhora's stunt double) from the Final Cut. (And yes, I'm aware I haven't mentioned all the cuts, just the ones I know).
- tclancy 1mo ago
- andyjohnson0 1mo agoActual title is "The Title Cards in Blade Runner Are Fucking Amazing" - and I'm pretty sure the hn submission said that yesterday. I prefer the original, and I don't understand the reason for bowdlerising it.
- inigyou 1mo agoWelcome to corporate. Swearing will not be tolerated.
- looperhacks 1mo agoWhile yes, the opening and title cards are very good, I can't get over the (imho) pretty "meh" layout of the crawling text. The right margin is very jagged (especially the "Replicant"), even when it doesn't appear to be necessary (notice that in "Replicants were used Off-world as\n slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and\n colonization of other planets.", the "slave" could've fit into the first line and "colonization" could've been hyphenated). If necessary, they also could've changed some of the wording for better typography. Also, the last two sentences weirdly seem to have different left margins.
- DrewADesign 1mo agoHyphenation isn’t the best for readability, which is especially important with moving text. (That’s also why there was so much leading, so it would be easy to see which line continued the one you’re looking at.) Many of the word combinations that were kept together rather than split up had much more impact together. Reading that the replicants were slave labor has more literary impact than them being slave labor. Avoiding left-edge raggedness is critical for readability, but avoiding right-edge raggedness is only more important than disturbing meaning and readability when either a) the block of text needs to have strong visual integrity in the context of other elements (even column gutters or page edges in some cases,) or b) when space is critical. In this case they made the right decision. The left margins in the final text block were for emphasis. Even in a business letter wouldn’t be out-of-bounds, but in creative writing it’s der rigueur, and in on-screen movie text, things like that are nearly required.
- joezydeco 1mo agoI think the placement of Replicant is deliberate. It's heading out of bounds and makes you uneasy when you see it.
- Cpoll 1mo ago> For the exposition crawl, they use standard capitalization except for two variants Three variants; "Robot" is capitalized though it is not a proper noun.
- rahulmax 1mo agoIt is quite mediocre. Nothing "fucking amazing" about the title cards. In the world of movie title cards, this one sits in the bottom half. Midway through, the article stops being about Blade runner and becomes "people building things with AI are creating garbage", and Blade runner title cards is now a prop that substantiates that opinion. It's fine if the typographic analysis holds up. It does not. I'm not able to see what OP is seeing. What am I missing?
- tclancy 1mo ago>In the world of movie title cards, this one sits in the bottom half. Really? Are we including B movies, porn, educational films (other than porn) in this massive list?
- mnw21cam 1mo agoDid the author forget to add pictures? They seem to be referred to in the text.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- johncoltrane 1mo agoEverything in Blade Runner is amazing.
- mikeaskew4 1mo agoAlways been fascinated by the craft of film titles. Powerpoints could be so more engaging with less words and more music.
- tenderfault 1mo agoThey are! I actually watch this movie pretty often just to understand why the interfaces and the fonts integrate so well into the overall plot and visual flow. So glad to see two of my favorite fonts in your list, namely IBM Plex Mono and Berkeley Mono. But you should have a look at their newest TX-02, you will be pleasantly surprised. Do share your ghostty setup! Did you manage yet to render your terminal data through the Denabase interface?
- oscillik 1mo agoDo you mean their unreleased typeface Houston Mono TX-24? TX-02 is already the SKU for Berkeley Mono…
- ghtbircshotbe 1mo ago> Chances are, you never think about typography. Probably not true for most of the people reading a blog post about typography
- stronglikedan 1mo ago> Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road. Fun fact: the reason all car commercials sound the same, and distinctly different from other types, is that people tend to pay attention to them, but only when they're in the market for a car. --source: ex worked as copywriter for ad agency
- wsintra2022 1mo agoThe skyline was inspired by north east England, Middlesbrough Teesside. ICI was one of the largest chemical sites in the world. Ridley Scott had studied at Teesside Polytechnic and took inspiration from the Imperial Chemical Industries that over looked Middlesbrough. One side of the skyline in the area you see towers and smoke billows and roaring flames, the other picturesque north Yorkshire moors and Odins Mount. Quite a contrast.
- inigyou 1mo agoI flagged this because it was written by an LLM.
- Magicrafter13 1mo agoI was enjoying this article, but several of the images don't seem to load on any device I try, so it's hard to keep following along with what the author is discussing. It kinda makes me want to mess around with special fonts on my blog, but designing a simple way to change fonts and font options on a per-post basis sounds difficult.