#fictional user interface

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.

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