May 20, 2025
Fictional user interfaces, buttons, and switches in Andor season two
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Fictional user interfaces, buttons, and switches in Andor season two
Fonts from the Future. A selection of sci-fi user interfaces, sorted by age. The numbers indicate the release year and the year the technology is supposed to come from.
The Terminator (1984/2029)
Robocop (1987/"the near future", aprox. 2000)
Patlabor 2 (1993/2002)
Psycho Pass Season 1 (2012/2112)
There are several features these designs have inherited from the first computer terminals (or CLI, command-line-interface) which came into use during the 60s. A light font on dark background, with the font itself beeing monospace. In these examples the fonts are a mix of serif and sans-serif, for actual programming sans-serif can make it hard to distinguish certain characters like O or 0. The monospace simply makes for a neatly formatted code. The green in Robocop stems from the fact that early terminal screens where monochrome cathode ray tubes filled with phospor (read: before we had color TV), and green phosophor was apparently the most cost effective gas. This also gave us the famous "green on black" code from "The Matrix". I thinks it is quite remarkable that our idea of futuristic displays is still shaped by a very limited technology from the last century.
Further reading/watching:
Pushing Pixels Fantasy UI, an ongoing series of interviews with designers who create user interfaces for film.
Behind The Screens, a youtube channel dedicated to computer code shown in movies.
Pushing buttons 02
Research: representation of photography in futuristic media. Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative. Released in 2018, set in UC 0096 (2176). The Gundam franchise has been going on since 1979 and with 20+ entries in the U.C. (universal century) timeline alone, it's an interesting source for comparison of how the representation of photography, books and cameras has changed over the years within the same fictional universe.
LATERAL APPROXIMATION DIAGRAM
(Fictional user interface creation #3)
CONTROL1 PAGE 3 DATA
(Fictional user interface creation #2)
AUG-03 CURRENT STATUS
(Fictional user interface creation #1)