2001’s Zero Gravity Toilet Sign and its Typography
The only intentional joke in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey, according to Arthur C. Clarke, was the moment where intrepid space traveller Heywood Floyd finds himself confounded and daunted by the glowing signage in the Aries 1B spacecraft's “zero gravity toilet”.
The scene is always good for a laugh, and is definitely memorable. But what kind of fool would write up a whole page of nonsense on the sign and its typesetting? Who, indeed?
You can read only the top three lines of text in the film — the rest is a hard to decipher blur, even in the 4K scan. But, in keeping with director Stanley Kubrick’s laser-sharp focus on detail, the set designers actually wrote up genuine toilet instructions for actor William Sylvester to ponder. The sign as a whole appears reasonably clearly in the film, and Piers Bizony’s 2016 book, “The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey” shows two useful photos of it – one a posed photo of Sylvester as per the film, and a straight-on view with regular lighting. (this latter clearly shows that the wall was actually painted a pale grey and looks darker in the film since it wasn’t very well lit)
However, all these occurrences show a backlit sign, which means the text is a bit blown out. Especially the small lettering. Fortunately, the picture that made up the sign was reproduced in Jerome Agel’s remarkable 1970 book, the Making of Kubrick’s 2001.
Arthur C. Clarke (right) shows the 2001 zero gravity toilet instructions to Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. At UNISPACE I, the UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in Vienna, Austria. August, 1968.
The Text
And you want to see the whole thing, don’t you? Well — here it is, in all its finery, in negative form as it appears in Agel’s book.
The instructional verbiage is kind of amusing, in that structurally it’s closer to UK English than US English, and it has some vaguely Germanic sentence constructions that make me wonder if Harry Lange actually wrote it. It’s classically and anachronistically sexist in its reference to “stewardesses”. And “dalkron” and “uroliminator” are great fictitious technowords!
Typography
Having made a replica of the HAL 9000 “brain room” sign, I thought it’d be fun to make a toilet sign as well. Turns out a lot of people have had the same idea and made their own versions, but unfortunately none I’ve seen has got it quite right. I suspect a lot of people worked from DVD/Blu-ray screenshots only, and didn’t know about the Agel reference.
The header type is relatively straightforward – it’s Eurostile Black. Just don’t use Eurostile Extended for the header text — a common mistake. Particularly since the latter has become a real science fiction stalwart, if not an outright typographical cliché. (2001, Silent Running, Space: 1999, Back to the Future, Star Trek movies, Starship Troopers, Johnny Mnemonic, District 9, Moon, Red Dwarf...)
Eurostile Black Extended/Microgramma was, however, used for the major numerals along the side.
Eurostile or Microgramma?
But wait – wasn’t the typeface Microgramma? Not Eurostile? Well, if you’re interested, here’s a little dive down that particular rabbit hole. Skip this section if you don’t care about the minutiae of typesetting.
Microgramma is the earlier typeface, designed by Aldo Novarese and Alessandro Butti in 1952, for Italian type foundry Nebiolo. However, it was a very limited face, and didn’t even have lowercase letters initially. Novarese then developed Eurostile a decade later. Its uppercase set was virtually identical to its predecessor, but includes a wider range of characters and styles. Microgramma was later revisited to include lowercase.
Now, surviving blueprints published in Adam K. Johnson’s 2001: the Lost Science, actually make reference to Microgramma on the control panels. And, given the widespread use of Letraset dry (rub-down) transfers for labelling everything on the ship, it seems reasonable that the 2001 designers also used Letraset for the header lettering on the toilet sign.
From what I can see, Letraset marketed sheets of their version of Eurostile in four flavours: Medium, Medium Extended, Bold, and Bold Extended. And they did muddy the waters a bit, by branding some sheets as both Microgramma Bold Extended and Eurostile Bold Extended. This is the type used on many of the control panel buttons.
For some reason the weight of Letraset Eurostile Bold corresponds to modern digital versions of Eurostile Black, not Eurostile Bold. But Microgramma is mostly available in its extended form, which is wider than either Bold or Black.
And if you want to go a little deeper, in Microgramma the distance between the vertical and diagonal strokes in the uppercase N is slightly further than the equivalent distance in Eurostile. The toilet sign N corresponds to Eurostile’s. And there you have it.
So. Does all that nonsense make sense? Fortunately, Eurostile is widely available today in all its variants, so it’s easy to make a copy of the sign using the right face and not worry about it!
Find that font
The real challenge is matching the type used to set the body text. This is difficult, since you need to find a modern digital typeface that’s close to whatever they used in Britain back in the 1960s. I really doubt that the big swathe of body text was done manually with dry transfers. They must have had an optically reversed transparency made, using blocks of typeset text that were pasted up by hand.
The best resource we’ve got – Agel – was printed in a paperback book the size of a novel. Fortunately it wasn’t printed on newsprint, but on coated stock in a “plates” section of the book. Nonetheless the text is really small, has a lot of inkspread, and is pretty low-rez. So, can we figure out the typeface they used?
The Search for the Body Typeface
Well, that body text looks kind of odd by contemporary standards. In particular, it seems heavy on the bottom, as if each letterform were vaguely egg shaped. And some characters have wacky details. The face looks handmade, lacking the astringent precision of digital typefaces you might commonly see today, such as Helvetica Neue, Univers, or Gotham.
What are some typefaces that are clearly not used on the sign?
Some zero gravity sign replicas use Helvetica/Univers/Arial type fonts, but those are not even close. The sign didn’t use a nearly oval or rounded typeface like many of these sans-serif fonts — it has a more squared-off look. Such character shapes are traditionally associated with a “condensed” form of a sans typeface.
Another idea is to use Eurostile, like the heading does. But that’s not right either. The text shapes are more ovoid than they are rounded rectangles with near-parallel sides. Eurostile also has wider letters than those on the sign.
A contemporary mistake is to use Eurostile and compress the type horizontally. Before the advent of digital type it was really unusual for anyone to scale a typeface by resizing it optically in one direction. Since PostScript was released in the early 80s people think nothing of squashing or stretching typefaces simply by typing, say, 110% in a dialogue box. This typically messes up the balance of a font design, resulting in thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical ones, but some people like the effect. Regardless, such scaling was impossible to do with hot metal machines, early phototypesetters, and dry transfers, and the Agel version clearly does not have scaled type.
I considered Franklin Gothic Condensed Demi, then Trade Gothic Condensed Bold. But while they were close in terms of metrics, the letterforms were wrong. And it’s worth noting that those are both American faces, and the film was made in England. In the pre-digital age typesetters basically didn’t use faces not sold locally. You couldn’t just download a font from the Internet! Now it’s true that the designers of the film were influenced by the look of the US space program, but that should have meant they used Futura if nothing else.
Letterform shapes
To compare letterforms, here are some sample uppercase O characters from certain typefaces. I’ve added translucent blue overlays to demonstrate the shapes involved.
1: Helvetica Bold. The letter is close to being a squashed circle, but not quite: the sides are just slightly less curved out. The overlay is an oval.
2: Futura Bold. An unusual typeface with nearly circular Os. The overlay is a perfect circle.
3: Eurostile Extended Black. A kind of ovoid shape, but note how it doesn’t have straight sides — they’re subtly curved out. It isn’t just a rectangle with rounded corners. The overlay is a straight-sided rectangle with rounded corners.
4: Eurostile Heavy. Not stretched horizontally like its extended cousin. The overlay is a rectangle with rounded corners.
5: Franklin Gothic Bold. Variable width strokes, with a shape that’s pretty close to an actual oval. Oval overlay.
6: Trade Gothic Bold Condensed. Note how this isn’t an oval, but it’s subtly more rectangular in shape. “Condensed” versions of typefaces tend to be slightly less oval than their regular companions. Oval overlay.
7: Monotype Headline Bold. This one isn’t simply less oval in shape, but it’s also subtly heavier/wider at the bottom.
Thoroughly grotesque
So, what did they use? Well, the closest digital fonts are Monotype Grotesque fonts.
I found these faces after looking into lists of common typefaces stocked by English typesetters in the mid-century metal type period. Monotype Headline Bold was English Monotype’s copy of Grotesque No 9; a somewhat idiosyncratic typeface developed by Stephenson Blake. Monotype Grotesque is a related font family dating back to the early 1900s. These faces have a number of rather odd quirky features, and are subtly bottom-heavy. By this I mean the curvature of the lower half of each letter is slightly greater than the upper half, making them resemble eggs with the pointy end up. And for those interested, it turns out that Letraset’s version of Grot No. 9 outline was used for the HAL 9000 logo.
For a while I felt that Headline Bold, in its digitized form at any rate, is heavier than you’d want (see image below; lower paragraph). And despite its name it isn’t a complete typeface family — there are no other weights available! But it matches Agel (below, upper paragraph) in every major respect aside from apparent weight.
I reviewed a bunch of other Monotype Grotesques, some of which seem closer in overall weight, but they all lack the notable idiosyncracies that Headline Bold has in common with the Agel scan.
I mean, just look at some of those wacky character details! Crazy, eh?
But thanks to “Dondragmer” on the RPF, who pointed out that higher-resolution scans of the Agel book show that the original sign did, in fact, have a heavier face that matches Headline Bold, I think we can now say with confidence that the typeface has been correctly identified! Check this out:
Pretty well dead on. The differences between the orange digital type and the scan underneath are caused by slight variations in letterspacing.
Show me a sign
Anyway. Here’s my final rendition of the sign. It uses URW Eurostile Black for the header text, URW Eurostile Black Extended for the big numerals, and Monotype Headline Bold for the body type. I believe those are as accurate as you’re going to get without employing a time machine.
I’ve tried to replicate the slightly uneven and handcrafted letterspacing and kerning as closely as possible (including the loose kerning for A and V in the first line). I also used F ligatures because the original sign did, though personally I don’t think they look very good on sans-serif justified type.
So, there you go. Another 2001 mystery solved!
How big was the sign?
The last major 2001 toilet mystery, I’d say, is how large the sign actually was. People have almost always assumed that the sign was roughly US Letter/A4 in size, based on the scene in the film where Floyd stares at it. One theory is that the sign was British foolscap folio (8" x 13") size – common enough in the pre-metric age. However, it turns out that the small sign theory is completely wrong. And the answer was right in front of us the whole time. At least in a general sense – the specifics of the sign size are not known.
The sign was surprisingly big, and actually appears in context three times in the film. There are two toilets on the passenger deck of the Aries 1B spacecraft, and both have backlit toilet signs on them. Here’s the best view of the three.
From this we can see that the sign is about 23% the height of the toilet door. The question now is – how tall was the door? There is a blueprint for the Aries 1B passenger deck set in Adam K. Johnson’s book 2001: the Lost Science, volume 1, which has some dimensions marked on it. Unfortunately the toilet doors are not shown in the cross-section view. The central lift door is dimensioned, however, and is 6'4" in height.
If the toilet door is the same height as the lift door, that would make the sign 17 1/2" in height. If, however, the toilet door is a bit shorter at, say, 6' tall, then we’d have a sign that’s 16 1/2" tall. Accordingly, the sign was likely somewhere around:
11 3/4" x 17 1/2" or 298mm x 446mm
or
11" x 16 1/2" or 280mm x 420mm
In terms of modern printing paper sizing, the sign was fairly close to international standard A3 paper, which is 297mm x 420mm in size. I think it’s unlikely that it was specifically sized to A3, since that was not a sizing system commonly used in the UK at the time. Also, the sign wouldn’t have been printed on a computer printer like it would today, so it’s doubtful that the the designers specifically targeted any particular paper size.
But it is handy for makers of prop replicas that a sign printed on A3 or A4 is going to be reasonably close, in terms of proportions, to what the original sign looked like – though a bit too wide. Likewise American and Canadian prop replica makers could use US Tabloid sizing, which is 11" x 17", and get something pretty close.
I think the original sign’s aspect ratio fell somewhere between the A-series ISO 216 international standard aspect ratio of 1.41, and the US Tabloid aspect ratio of 1.55. US Letter and US Legal, which obviously don’t follow any particular system, are both way out in terms of proportions here.
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