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 immediately immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.
ColdStream 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
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 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.
schoen 3 hours ago [-]
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.
rafram 3 hours ago [-]
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.
anigbrowl 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
roughly 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
majormajor 21 minutes ago [-]
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).
ColdStream 35 minutes ago [-]
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."
jameshart 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cgorlla 2 hours ago [-]
A typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
warmjets222 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
hcs 2 hours ago [-]
I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
nphardon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lilboo 2 hours ago [-]
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?
cgorlla 1 hours ago [-]
Every post is actually scanned for LLM content as well.
EarlKing 1 hours ago [-]
Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
mannyv 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
isoprophlex 8 minutes ago [-]
Title as submitted to HN is missing a word.
roughly 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
majormajor 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
freetime2 2 hours ago [-]
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."
lilboo 2 hours ago [-]
Why?
shermantanktop 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
eszed 59 minutes ago [-]
What's this unavoidable YouTube video that activates on-scroll? I that doesn't become a design pattern, because it's horrible.
julienchastang 1 hours ago [-]
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.
beej71 45 minutes ago [-]
Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.
jcims 44 minutes ago [-]
>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.
teo_zero 1 hours ago [-]
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?
roughly 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
Applejinx 47 minutes ago [-]
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'.
mpfh 1 hours ago [-]
I think Rands had too much coffee.
draw_down 51 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
2 hours ago [-]
lilboo 2 hours ago [-]
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
dfxm12 1 hours ago [-]
Enter the Void. Not that's an amazing title sequence.
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
Computer0 2 hours ago [-]
I found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.
ljm 2 hours ago [-]
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.
anigbrowl 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 00:43:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Considering he recorded something like 35 albums, he was doing something right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hA0z4GQjtA
I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.
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).
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."
Almost a bit too on the nose.
Fyi.
I’m glad there are people obsessed with fonts. But writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting.
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.
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?
Haven’t read the alien article yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-seque...
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
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.
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.