![]() It’s probably very sensible that Passengers Are Advised To Read Instructions Before Use. The Clavius flight also features Eurostile Bold (not Extended) in the instructions for the ship’s comedy Zero Gravity Toilet. This logo (and the name RCA Whirlpool) was dropped in 1966, suggesting that this scene may have been filmed earlier in the movie’s production: Floyd’s subsequent flight to the Clavius moon base. ![]() (Their logo was redesigned by Saul Bass the year after 2001 was released.)Įagle-eyed viewers may spot a logo for RCA Whirlpool (now the Whirlpool Corporation) during Dr. There’s also another real-world company logo, this time for the American Bell Telephone Company. Floyd’s video call to his daughter sees another use of Eurostile Bold Extended. This is ironic, given that it updated its classic logo in 1998, a year or so before this scene takes place:ĭr. Just like Pan Am, the Howard Johnson’s chain of restaurants doesn’t seem to have changed its logo since the sixties. This logo doesn’t match any I can find from their history, but it is very reminiscent of the iconic signage for the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles: The Hilton chain of hotels has opened an outpost on Space Station 5. UPDATE: In response to this article, Erik van Blokland has posted a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of Eurostile, Microgramma, and HAL interface artwork from the traveling Kubrick exhibition. Let’s just call it Eurostile and get on with things. Who knows, it could be Microgramma throughout the entire film. ![]() Actually, there might be some mistaking it, because it could just as easily be Eurostile’s precursor, Microgramma. 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: 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: Afterall, the fetus appears to be in some kind of glowing orb and floats through space, where it is able to gain a simple, yet powerful, existential perspective: a view of the earth from space.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. This could be read either as his regression back to a state of blissful ignorance, similar to the primates before they encountered the monolith, or an evolution into some new state of technological primitivism. He is disturbed each time a new aged version of himself is revealed until he's transformed into a fetus and exists with tranquility. Although these advancements are exciting, they also bring with them serious existential conundrums, such as the beginning of weaponized warfare, the discovery of the alien monolith on the moon, and the emerging sentience of HAL.Īnd perhaps Bowman's rapid aging at the end of the film is representative of the price humanity pays for these advancements. Mankind's harnessing of technology is one of the clear themes of the movie, and the moment the primates first start using the bone as a tool can be seen as a direct precursor to the later sections of the movie that depict man in an advanced space age.
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