Well, 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.
It 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.
I still love the parody of contemporaries Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, and Moroder in the Adult Swim "Infomercial" called "Live from the Necropolis: Lords of Synth": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino
You 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.
It's one of those "lies programmers believe" kind of things - we like to think that there is one definitive "notation" of a piece of music - but even when there IS accurate sheet music, it only tells part of the story.
Music before recordings was much closer to jam-band style than people realize; and in the Middle Ages you could hear substantial differences in the same song just by traveling a few tens of miles.
This is true. I read an interview with Hans Zimmer who has scored dozens of Hollywood films (including Blade Runner 2049) and when he first arrived in London in the 1980s he couldn’t read music. Not sure about now.
ETA: he did eventually learn how to read music:
“I learnt to read music after I bought the Roland MC8 Microcomposer, because it then became essential for me. … I learnt music by ear and have picked up most of my technical knowledge through the sessions and gigs.”
Watching it may help you appreciate just how important the Williams' score was to Star Wars' success. It's one of the all-time greats!
I'd also add that some movies are worth watching purely because of their score. e.g. "Conan the Barbarian" is a pretty shlocky flick. However, the director and composer took a collaborative approach to the score that was closer to opera than film. Unlike most movies, work on the score began before filming and there was continual collaboration during filming. The result remains one of the best scores in the history of film, and a film that makes the music its backbone.
As we say in another language, "you should probably get your ears cleaned".
Besides the Blade Runner & Chariots of Fire soundtracks (two masterpieces of albums, which is two more than 90% of the world), his repertoire is filled with instant electronic classics, such as Earth, Albedo 0.39, Spiral, and l'Apocalypse des Animaux.
> 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.
With 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.
You'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.
Also 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.
What’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.
It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
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).
Yeah, 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.
I'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.
Having read LOTR many, many times before I ever started trying to read Pratchett, I can't read Pratchett. That's not a slam at Sir Terry; I'd just internalized Tolkien so much that it was beyond my ability to properly appreciate him.
If you haven't tried it, Small Gods is frequently recommended as a standalone, and it's very far in subject matter from the early tolkien-parody rincewind/guards books.
I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.
I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.
"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."
What 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?
This 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.
I 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.
Small 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.
Normal 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.
Yeah, 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Probably 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.
The 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.
I agree. I think some creations are absolutely rare, unique and unlikely artefacts of culture and circumstances. Technology, people, means, vision and all sorts of other aspects had to collide and conspire to bear fruit to these marvels. Especially for big team projects such as movies. Another examples that come to my mind are computer games StarCraft: Brood War and Bioshock: Infinite. Complex visionary collaborative projects resulting in absolute perfection. Wow, just wow. Humanity truly can be amazing if it gets its shit together
>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?
It really is for me a pinnacle. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to be part of something like this. Do you even know? I’m just some random fifty something among billions and your comment resonated because it was a shared experience. I have no idea if my grandchildren could watch the movie and come away with that but my cumulative nature and nurture sure as hell did.
I've wondered about this too. Did Ridley Scott and crew set out to make the greatest movie ever (IMO)? Or did something magical happen? My guess is "auteurs" often set out to create a masterwork but usually something beyond their control derails that. But, if they are lucky, they stumble upon something extraordinary that touches the heart of the human experience and that only happens once in a lifetime, if even that.
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.
There 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).
These 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.
Completely trusting it to the AI is negligent, I don't think any serious projects do it this way. A lot of AI usage yes, but reviews and tweaks still require someone reading and understanding code, structures and design patterns.
I think so too, but the problem is that this was a 'serious' project. Some tech leaders genuinely believe that AI writes better code than humans, and the sad part is that they're somewhat right.
So these days, I'm not sure anymore. I just do coding as a hobby now.
I once asked out of curiosity, and I still remember the answer:
'Why do I trust AI more than you? Because you code based on your own thinking, and that doesn't always match mine. But if I run AI against the spec I wrote, at least when I take responsibility, I won't feel like I got screwed over.'
The project had no issues. Of course it didn't—most CRUD work already has well-established solutions
I’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.
While 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.
IIRC 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-... ). So some level of oddity around red could come from that.
Oooh 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.
This 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.
I 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.
This 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
I'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
Nope. 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!)
I 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.
Creating 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.
Yes, 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.
The 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.
It'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'.
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.
Well, 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.
It 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.
I still love the parody of contemporaries Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, and Moroder in the Adult Swim "Infomercial" called "Live from the Necropolis: Lords of Synth": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino
You 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.
It's one of those "lies programmers believe" kind of things - we like to think that there is one definitive "notation" of a piece of music - but even when there IS accurate sheet music, it only tells part of the story.
Music before recordings was much closer to jam-band style than people realize; and in the Middle Ages you could hear substantial differences in the same song just by traveling a few tens of miles.
Not knowing the alphabet of music lets the mind make its own more efficient abstractions.
This is true. I read an interview with Hans Zimmer who has scored dozens of Hollywood films (including Blade Runner 2049) and when he first arrived in London in the 1980s he couldn’t read music. Not sure about now.
ETA: he did eventually learn how to read music:
“I learnt to read music after I bought the Roland MC8 Microcomposer, because it then became essential for me. … I learnt music by ear and have picked up most of my technical knowledge through the sessions and gigs.”
https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/ronnys-electro-music-caba...
Insightful Hans Zimmer, 1982:
"You should be able to get something out of a machine that is better than an average musician."
I think he was even more `absolutely right` than he even thought
Dave Grohl is another one that comes to mind.
Also Kurt Cobain, as noted by Rick Beato:
"It doesn't matter if people know what they are doing, if they can just do it intuitively"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1ZnWc-sFd0
Vangelis is a bit funny and odd! Have a listen of Jon Anderson's (formerly of Yes) account of meeting and collaborating with Vangelis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItV5h3Arl5M
Priceless video, thank you so much.
You will love this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hA0z4GQjtA
I rarely read about the contribution a good music score has to a movie's popularity. A great score makes the movie. For example,
The Blue Max, Ben Hur, the first Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dr Zhivago, Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and, of course, Blade Runner!
The original teaser for Star Wars was made before they had John Williams' score:
https://youtu.be/XHk5kCIiGoM?si=VxAJcCATzwn6gZPw
Watching it may help you appreciate just how important the Williams' score was to Star Wars' success. It's one of the all-time greats!
I'd also add that some movies are worth watching purely because of their score. e.g. "Conan the Barbarian" is a pretty shlocky flick. However, the director and composer took a collaborative approach to the score that was closer to opera than film. Unlike most movies, work on the score began before filming and there was continual collaboration during filming. The result remains one of the best scores in the history of film, and a film that makes the music its backbone.
That soundtrack is absolutely perfect.
As good as that track is its literally his only good stuff. Try as I might, and as eager as I was to like him his library of music just falls flat.
As we say in another language, "you should probably get your ears cleaned".
Besides the Blade Runner & Chariots of Fire soundtracks (two masterpieces of albums, which is two more than 90% of the world), his repertoire is filled with instant electronic classics, such as Earth, Albedo 0.39, Spiral, and l'Apocalypse des Animaux.
I'm not even mentioning Aphrodite's Child.
Chariots of fire soundtrack was good too.
Try Soil Festivities
> 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.
Also touched on at https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ (and the book)
I Wish the author would write more articles, I enjoyed these when they came out immensely.
Came here to say the same thing.
I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
With 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.
You'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.
Also 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.
Exactly. That's not just a load-bearing truth — it's a testament to the power of the contemporary zeitgeist!
You hit the nail on the smoking gun.
I applaud your excellent (sorry, cat stole the rest).
What’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.
It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
What can ya do?
My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
Casablanca 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).
Yeah, 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.
Stop trying to steal The Matrix. It was released in 1999, that's OUR movie. You get the sequels.
I'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.
Having read LOTR many, many times before I ever started trying to read Pratchett, I can't read Pratchett. That's not a slam at Sir Terry; I'd just internalized Tolkien so much that it was beyond my ability to properly appreciate him.
If you haven't tried it, Small Gods is frequently recommended as a standalone, and it's very far in subject matter from the early tolkien-parody rincewind/guards books.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.
I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.
Same thing happened to Tolkien and fantasy literature.
I read LOTR in the early 70s. There was nothing else like it then.
Thematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer.
Almost a bit too on the nose.
A typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
Will 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."
If 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."
Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.
You 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.
Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
There'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.
What 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?
Every post is actually scanned for LLM content as well.
This 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.
I 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.
Blade Runner is absolute perfection in every aspect. It’s crazy how deep Ridley Scott has fallen since
Small 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.
Normal 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.
Yeah, 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.
Love small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.
> 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
I 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.
In older films and lower budget films into the 90s, you could expect the titles to wobble up and down and left and right from frame to frame, too.
> (and then maybe optically compositing them on top of other elements)
Right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw&t=3m20s
Whoa, great catch! I can't unsee it.
As someone who isn't a type nerd, I think a more apt title would be "The Title Cards in Blade Runner are Thoughtfully Executed."
Why?
Probably 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.
The 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.
I agree. I think some creations are absolutely rare, unique and unlikely artefacts of culture and circumstances. Technology, people, means, vision and all sorts of other aspects had to collide and conspire to bear fruit to these marvels. Especially for big team projects such as movies. Another examples that come to my mind are computer games StarCraft: Brood War and Bioshock: Infinite. Complex visionary collaborative projects resulting in absolute perfection. Wow, just wow. Humanity truly can be amazing if it gets its shit together
>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?
It really is for me a pinnacle. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to be part of something like this. Do you even know? I’m just some random fifty something among billions and your comment resonated because it was a shared experience. I have no idea if my grandchildren could watch the movie and come away with that but my cumulative nature and nurture sure as hell did.
> Do you even know?
I've wondered about this too. Did Ridley Scott and crew set out to make the greatest movie ever (IMO)? Or did something magical happen? My guess is "auteurs" often set out to create a masterwork but usually something beyond their control derails that. But, if they are lucky, they stumble upon something extraordinary that touches the heart of the human experience and that only happens once in a lifetime, if even that.
Rachael smoking in that scene is almost like a painting, a masterpiece.
I love the whole movie and soundtrack with the same enthusiasm as you, it's one of my favorites, but that scene with Rachael is something else.
Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.
Good luck even finding the non-directors cut.
I liked the film noir voice-over.
> 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.
Is it transcribed anywhere?
There 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).
Berkeley Mono is an excellent font. Highly recommended if you still code.
https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
And by the way, this website is fantastic.
https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono - Is a free, open-source alternative.
What 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.
These 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.
Completely trusting it to the AI is negligent, I don't think any serious projects do it this way. A lot of AI usage yes, but reviews and tweaks still require someone reading and understanding code, structures and design patterns.
I think so too, but the problem is that this was a 'serious' project. Some tech leaders genuinely believe that AI writes better code than humans, and the sad part is that they're somewhat right.
So these days, I'm not sure anymore. I just do coding as a hobby now. I once asked out of curiosity, and I still remember the answer:
'Why do I trust AI more than you? Because you code based on your own thinking, and that doesn't always match mine. But if I run AI against the spec I wrote, at least when I take responsibility, I won't feel like I got screwed over.'
The project had no issues. Of course it didn't—most CRUD work already has well-established solutions
I’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.
While 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.
IIRC 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-... ). So some level of oddity around red could come from that.
Oooh 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.
This 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.
I 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.
This 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
I'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
Nope. 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!)
What's this unavoidable YouTube video that activates on-scroll? I that doesn't become a design pattern, because it's horrible.
Title as submitted to HN is missing a word.
Interesting. While the missing word doesn’t contribute any new information, it does convey a feeling. Like a typeface.
IBM Plex Mono totally slaps. Look at those braces!
Enter the Void. Not that's an amazing title sequence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-seque...
I 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
No, 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?
Creating 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.
Yes, 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.
The 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.
It'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'.
I think Rands had too much coffee.
>I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. Maybe this person and I could become friends.
I found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.
Paging John Gruber!
Wow 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
I'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.
Your education may have been lacking.
The em dashs are a callback to the silent film title cards days –– they represent a pause in speech.