The typefaces used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey have garnered a lot of interest over the years. The visual look of the film has been highly influential in its portrayal of what the future would look like, and the fonts were an integral part of that look.
Various people have looked at the typefaces used in the film and drawn up commentaries; most prominently Dave Addey’s Typeset in the Future blog and book.
I’ve done a lot of work on this subject, and thought I’d write up some of my findings in case they’re interesting to anyone else. These notes make a few discoveries, shed some light on some aspects of 2001 typography never documented before, and correct a few points.
(and, yes, all the text in the illustration above, except for the 3Dsf.info logo in the corner, actually appeared in the movie or was used on set!)
Investigating fonts used in the making of 2001 is tricky. There are several common mistakes that we must avoid when hunting down what might have been used.
So to begin this article, a bit of a diversion covering aspects to how the typefaces were researched.
In short, I focused on commercial typefaces – both specific fonts and also type technology – that were readily available in Britain in the mid 1960s. Everything else was ignored. This is why.
Production dates
It may seem obvious, but many typefaces are chronologically impossible. After all, countless faces simply didn’t exist yet when 2001 was filmed, from 1965 to 1967.
For example, they obviously couldn’t have used something like Avant Garde, which was released in 1970. Or Avenir, which came out in 1987. Or any digital font from the Google Fonts collection, which was launched in 2010.
Production country
2001 was almost entirely filmed in the UK. (I say almost because some pre-production work and brief effects shots were done in New York) Its typesetting is therefore UK English.
In the 1960s the print products on the market differed significantly from one country to the next. It’s not like the post-Internet world, where everything is available everywhere as a simple download. Back in the day it was normal for British designers to rely on a bunch of typefaces sold to the UK market, for American designers to use mostly US typefaces, etc. This was both practical (what’s available where) and cultural.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for a British designer to have used Franklin Gothic, or for an American designer to have used Gill Sans. Just that in the context of 2001 it’s important to focus on products readily available in Britain in the mid 1960s.
For instance, 2001 used typewritten material produced on an IBM Selectric typewriter, which were American products sold in the UK. But the film also used fonts originated by Stephenson Blake, a font foundry almost unheard of in the US.
Digital versus earlier tech
Another problem is that people often assume that digital copies of older designs are identical to typefaces used in the 1960s. But that is rarely the case. Back then hot metal type – a technology where large machines used hot liquid metal to create blocks of type for printing – was still common. Phototypesetters – machines which projected letters onto photosensitive material – existed, but did not yet rule the roost in the UK. These systems produced material with specific looks, and modern digital tech was decades away in the future.
Even typefaces that existed across the decades may look quite different in popular digital forms than they did in the past. For example, it was normal for different sizes of a font to look subtly different when using hot metal technology. Each type matrix was carefully hand-cut to match the requirements and characteristics of the specific type size; reflecting the way the eye reads details, the way ink spreads on the page when printed, etc. Optical phototypesetters and vector graphic digital typesetting often have a single version of a font that gets scaled up or down in size as required. (this is not counting algorithmic tools in the digital world, such as hinting and scalable/parametric masters)
The point? Well, when hunting down the look of a font, a modern digital version might copy one size of a hot metal font, and fail to capture the subtleties involved in scaling the font. Or a digital type designer might faithfully replicate a specific font made by a specific company at a specific time, ending up with a product that differs from another rendition of the typeface. Or a designer might “clean up” or otherwise regularize a design from days of yore, making it a modern idealized version that lacks some of the idiosyncrasies or inconsistencies of the original. Alternative characters were frequently omitted from early digitizations. Fonts can also be renamed, adding to the confusion.
Then of course there’s the fact that a lot of typefaces are simply unlicensed copies of pre-existing ones. Bitstream, for example, was notorious for digitally duplicating other peoples’ typefaces and selling them under different names. (“Swiss” was their clone of Helvetica, for example)
At least three minor fonts used in the movie have never been commercially digitized, making them harder to track down today.
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Related to above – you couldn’t easily alter the width of a font back then. Nowadays we think nothing of typing “95%” or whatever into a font width box and instantly changing the horizontal scaling – squashing or stretching the font. But years ago, whether you were using hot metal or phototypesetting, you would have to do some complicated photographic work to rescale a font (or any image) in one direction only.
Accordingly, the idea that a mystery font was simply “Font XYZ scaled horizontally” is highly unlikely, and thus scaled fonts were never considered for this research.
Professional versus amateur
Virtually all typefaces prior to about 1970 were created by large typesetting corporations, commonly called font foundries. Not only was designing type difficult, but the financial barrier to entry was high. Making metal matrix masters or even photographic plates was really complicated and costly. Most typeface designers worked for one of these companies, and only a few really made it in the biz.
The first crack in the wall was probably Letraset, which held design competitions and released winning fonts in their Letragraphica line. But it was the rise of microcomputers in the 1980s, and accessible font editors like Fontographer, that really transformed typography.
Nowadays huge numbers of fonts flood the Internet, created either by tech giants like Google or hobbyist and small business designers. Using those “find that font” websites is basically useless since they search a bazillion modern and amateur typefaces in addition to the handful of classical commercial ones.
Therefore the fonts of 2001 were sourced from a relatively small number of companies in the UK, and that’s what I focused on. I looked at old type catalogues and sample pages from British companies.
Eurostile versus Microgramma
A lot of folks seem to take it as axiomatic that 2001 used Eurostile everywhere. Well, not quite. It did use Eurostile once or twice, but it was actually Eurostile’s predecessor Microgramma Extended that appeared in a few key places. I talk about that a bit further on.
This may sound rather nitpicky. That’s because it is. What else did you expect from a font nerd writeup? It’d be like correctly using the words font versus typeface, which as you know are not the same thing!
Now, an apology. I’m using Google Sites to host this material, basically because it’s essentially free. Unfortunately Sites does an atrocious job of handling graphic inserts, and doesn’t let you adjust spacing between sections. And I had to split the text into sections to get each of the following headings displayed in their correct fonts.
This all results in this crappy looking page. Sorry about that. At some point I’ll probably migrate this content to somewhere less cruddy than Sites, or re-host it on my own site, but first I need to find the time...
Okay, and back to the actual fonts used in the movie. First, 2001’s production used Letraset rub-down dry transfers to create prop and set lettering. A lot of Letraset.
Now, instant lettering may be unfamiliar to folks unfamiliar with pre-digital typesetting, so I’ve written up a separate page describing this now largely obsolete typesetting and graphic design technology. Check it out!
Letraset was shiny new technology in the mid 60s (the product had existed for just 4 years when 2001 set building began), and the British company’s work was highly influential. The specific typefaces available from the company affected the look and feel of a lot of publications – and of 2001.
The film’s designers, especially Harry Lange, manually rubbed down bazillions of letters all over the futuristic props and sets. Letraset letters were also used by Douglas Trumbull to create the simulated computer screen animations. This was not a film which relied on handpainted signage, the way films had for decades.
Now one open question remains: did the 2001 production commission Letraset to produce custom typeset sheets to simplify lettering work in the movie? It’s known that Letraset had the capability to do so, and in fact advertised its bespoke production services in the mid 1960s. Is it possible that some of the text in the movie wasn’t done letter by letter, but was done as rub-down text blocks custom-ordered?
Maybe. There’s no evidence one way or the other for this. Much of the text in the movie isn’t repeated content, so perhaps this wasn’t seen as necessary. Also of note is that the HAL 9000 and USAA logos were produced as waterslide (wet transfer) decals for the movie. So. Who knows?
Some of the type seen in the film was of course used in title cards and credit sequences, etc. Three different typefaces were used at different points in the story.
I don’t know what typesetting technology was used to produce the cards. They might have been Letraset, they might have printed them using traditional phototypesetting. The fonts used were available through both means at the time.
As a side note it’s interesting that all three faces were designed in the late 1920s to early 1930s.
This quintessentially British typeface, designed by Eric Gill in 1928, was used for the three title cards in the opening sequence, and the intermission card.
Round uppercase letter Os were substituted for the oval zeroes in 2001, making it look a bit like Futura. Also the colon has rectangular dots, whereas Gill Sans’ colon (including the Letraset version) has round dots. I don’t know which font they lifted the colon from.
Gill Sans was used for the 1968 “the ultimate trip” psychedelic eye publicity poster for the film. (not the original release posters, which used Robert McCall paintings)
Incidentally Gill Sans, which was inspired by the font designed by Edward Johnston for the London Underground, is used pretty well everywhere for everything in the UK. It bears a classic elegance, but is also stained by the discovery in the 1980s that Gill was a sexual abuser of his family as well as a remarkable artist.
Gill Sans is available digitally from Monotype and Adobe Fonts.
This 1935 font by Berthold Wolpe was used for the “Dawn of Man” title card. The face, a sort of transitional one between serif and sans-serif, is clearly appropriate for the portrayal of the alien-induced cognitive leap forward of early hominins.
Like Gill Sans it’s very much a British typeface. Wolpe was a German artist and designer who escaped to the UK during the rise of the Nazis. He created Albertus for British type foundry Monotype, and used it on countless classic Faber & Faber book covers. A modified version of Albertus was the Village font in the 1960s cult TV show the Prisoner. (a show which also used Microgramma and Futura Bold fonts, incidentally) The City of London and the Borough of Lambeth use it for their street signs to this day.
Albertus is available from Monotype.
The jump to the far future of the Jupiter Mission is heralded by the spare geometric simplicity of Paul Renner’s 1927 Futura. “Beyond the Infinite” and the closing credits are set in the same face.
But – is it Futura?
Down the rabbit hole we go...
At first glance the text has that lovely precise Futura look to it. But closer examination reveals numerous subtle differences, especially with letters with spiky apexes. (Futura Bold, which this is not, has flat apexes; Futura Medium has sharp apexes)
More specifically:
M: the outer stems are vertical and are flat on the top, not diagonals leading to a sharp apex. Similar, but not identical, to Gill Sans. (Gill Sans has heavier strokes for the equivalent height, and the lower apex of the M is sharp, not squared-off) This is not, incidentally, constructed by two reflected halves of the letter N – the angles don’t line up.
A, N: squared-off apexes.
W: central apex lowered, and the strokes are thinner. There also appear to be ink traps in the corners, which Futura does not have. (ink traps are slightly curved openings where strokes join, to compensate for ink spreading when printed on paper)
R and D: possibly subtle stroke variations compared to the fairly even strokes of Futura.
J: the terminal is slightly flatter in curvature; thinner.
However, most of the other characters are identical to Futura. Including some characters that are uniquely Futuristic, such the letter S and numerals 8 and 1.
Now for a clearer comparison.
Consider the image above. The first line is how the text appears in the film. The second is an unmodified Futura Book.
You can easily see the heavily modified letters – M, W, N. Note also how some letters such as the R and D look like they might have subtle stroke differences that don’t exist in Futura, and the R is wider. And this isn’t the Letraset version of Futura Medium, either, which is pretty well identical to the version I posted above.
Now. Futura’s great success lead to a bunch of shameless knockoff fonts in the 1930s and 1940s, including Airport Gothic, Twentieth Century, Nobel, and Spartan, and to a lesser extent Metro and Vogue. I considered the possibility that it was one of those. However, most seem to have diagonals to their letter M, or have other differences (Nobel has M and N that are close, but not W and G).
Another possibility is Erbar Grotesk kräftig (Ludwig & Mayer), a 1926 geometric sans by Jakob Erbar that slightly predates Futura, but which is largely forgotten today. It had alternative glyphs which nearly match the M and N (though not W) from the movie, but there also some differences – the R in particular differs in width, and the G has an angle to the end of its spur.
Conclusion
I don’t know for sure if 2001 used a modified Futura, or something else. I strongly suspect it’s a modified Futura.
Why? The gap after the initial letter M in “METRO,” and the fact that the W has lighter strokes and ink traps are the main bits of evidence. Also of note is that the “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead” legalese is set with normal Futura Ms and Ns.
Okay. Enough conjecture.
Futura, or whatever it was, was an apt choice for the film. It was originally designed humbly enough – in 1920s Germany as part of the Neues Frankfurt public housing development. While Paul Renner himself wasn’t part of the Bauhaus movement, he was influenced by the revolutionary ideas in art, design, and architecture that flourished in Weimar Germany before the crushing onslaught of Nazism.
The typeface he created was simplified (many of its idiosyncrasies, particularly his angular lowercase letters, are forgotten today) and heavily promoted by type foundry Bauer. It was later widely used in the 1960s by NASA and other related organizations. In fact, the “we came in peace” plaque, on the Apollo 11 lunar lander to this day, was set in Futura Medium. Tons of companies use Futura. Even IKEA used a Futura knockoff until they ditched it in favour of the Godawful Microsoft Verdana.
Adobe did a digitization of Futura with their early Postscript software of the 1980s, but it was a bit inconsistent and appears to have been withdrawn. They now license a version of Futura by ParaType (PT); a company many designers will not use owing to the firm’s ties with the Russian government. Apple include a few versions of Futura with macOS, licensed from Bauer. Bauer, which retain the original Paul Renner drawings of Futura, sell a new version of the typeface directly. Microsoft license the URW version and include a few versions with Windows.
Then there are the typefaces that are in-universe, as it were. Stuff visible to the characters.
The australopithecines didn’t use any fonts, strangely enough. But all the future sequences had props and sets with lettering all over. The space vehicle sequences also used simulated computer screens with type on them.
The majority of this material was created using Letraset dry transfers. The main exceptions were the typewritten material on the computer screens, and most likely the main body text of the toilet sign.
The names in brackets, incidentally, are the font foundries which created them and licensed them to Letraset.
This is the typeface used on the exterior surfaces of the EVA pods, on all the Discovery/EVA pod/Orion/Moonbus controls (pushbuttons and panels), the pushbuttons on the spacesuit wrist controller, and on other in-film signage such as the HAL brain room sign, seen below.
This is a digital version of the Futura Bold font that I made for a personal project by scanning an original Letraset sheet, tracing the outlines, and building them into an OpenType font using the excellent Glyphs tool. I intentionally didn’t regularize the kerning, nor did I smooth out any of the lines to reflect an idealized geometry of the scan.
Futura Bold is probably the primary font used in the film in terms of the sheer volume of objects using it, though it may not be evident at first glance since much of the lettering is relatively small.
For example, pretty well every button and control in the EVA pod below is labelled with Letraset Futura Bold text, though you obviously can’t really tell just by watching the film.
Futura’s Bold weight is also associated with 2001 since it was used to create a logotype used for many of the film’s movie posters and other material, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s novel and the soundtrack release. (ie: mostly the stuff that used the Robert McCall painting of the Orion leaving Space Station V)
Note that unlike the Gill Sans title, the Futura version doesn’t use the round letter O as a substitute for zero. But, interestingly enough, the zeroes do appear to be wider horizontally – they’re sort of halfway between the zero and the O in width.
Microgramma is the typeface used as headlines for the computer screens, and occasionally elsewhere such as the numerals on the toilet signs, the weightless warning on the Aries 1B, and the language selection pushbuttons on the space station.
The latter, shown below, clearly indicates that we’ll be speaking Dutch and Italian in the future! It’s amusing that Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi aren’t there (languages 1, 3, and 4 in 1965).
Digital version of the fonts created by scanning original Letraset sheets.
Eurostile Extended is the face most people think of as the Future Font, as immortalized in countless science fiction classics (Thunderbirds, UFO, Space:1999, Silent Running, Star Trek: the Motion Picture, Back to the Future, Wall-E, Red Dwrf, District 9, Moon...).
But to be completely accurate, 2001 actually used Microgramma Extended Bold. (same goes for Thunderbirds, UFO, and Space:1999)
How do I know this? Well, Microgramma Extended Bold and Eurostile Extended Black are almost identical, but have some subtle differences, mainly where diagonal strokes meet verticals. The former was designed by Aldo Novarese and Alessandro Butti and released by the Nebiolo Type Foundry of Turin, Italy, in 1952. When it first was released it was uppercase only. Eurostile came out a few years later, had lowercase letters from the start, and was credited to Aldo Novarese alone (Butti having died earlier).
Microgramma Extended Medium (left) and Eurostile Extended (right). This the most noticeable difference between the fonts.
2001 used Letraset’s version, which was Microgramma Extended for the uppercase letters. The film never used Letraset’s lowercase letters, which were Eurostile Extended.
The three-letter displays on the computer screens used Extended Bold, with Extended Medium used for the smaller text printed above each headline.
In addition to the 4K scans of the movie available on Blu-Ray, which reveals a lot of detail we couldn’t see before, this exhibition photo is very useful. It’s a picture taken at the German Film Museum (DFF) in 2018, during a Space Odyssey exhibition. It shows some of the original transparencies that stood in as computer screens in the centrifuge set, for scenes when the wheel was turning and thus the film projectors couldn’t work. You can clearly see the fonts used.
The “Mission Control” and “Survey” transparencies are interesting, since they aren’t seen in the final film. I wonder what they were meant to be used for.
The lunchbox on the moonbus appears to have a hand-drawn bit of text that’s designed to look like a stencil version of Microgramma.
Finally, the earliest example I can find of a “futuristic” production using Microgramma is the British children’s TV show Thunderbirds (1965). This Gerry Anderson series was also an early pioneer in the use of Letraset.
The digitized URW version of Microgramma is available from URW/Monotype, and licensed via Adobe Fonts.
The typeface used to make the HAL 9000 logotype. This one took some work to uncover. And time – it wasn't until 2012 and 2014 that two books (Adam Johnson’s 2001: the Lost Science and Piers Bizony’s The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey) published high-resolution copies of the original logo. From this, and related material, I was able to figure out the actual font that was used. Check the link for more detailed information on the font and the HAL 9000 faceplates.
And here it is. Letraset’s outline version of the classic English font, Grotesque No. 9. By the way, “Grotesque,” or “Grotesk” from the German, is simply an anachronistic (19th century) name for a sans-serif font, and the 9 is just an arbitrary catalogue number for the font, not the point size or anything.
Thunderbirds (1965) used Grot 9 for its opening titles, incidentally. While a rather strange typeface to modern eyes, filled with odd details, it was commonly used in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, having been released by Stephenson Blake of Sheffield in 1909. It’s pretty well unknown outside the UK, however.
The digitized version of Grotesque No. 9 is available via URW/Monotype.
Letraset’s version of Folio Bold Condensed is seen in a number of places. The numerals on the ends of the HAL 9000 memory blocks, the textual notices on the HAL memory block panel, and probably the “Clavius Base” text on the moonbase ID badges. (“Security Office” and “355” are Microgramma Extended Medium)
A digital version is available from Monotype.
Occasional signage use, such as the zero gravity toilet sign headings (not the body text). A lot of folks apparently think that it was used all over the film, but it was actually pretty rare. Also, see the note above about Microgramma.
For more information on said toilet sign, check out my entire page on the topic!
The body text of the toilet sign, and also the LIQUIPAK text on the Aries 1B’s liquid food packs. Most likely typeset traditionally, since this font was not produced by Letraset, and then reproduced on film for the backlit panel. The numerals on the toilet signage are Microgramma Extended Medium.
This is Monotype’s 1956 variant of Stephenson Blake’s 1906-1907 typeface Grotesque No 9, designed by Eleisha Pechey. (ie: the origin of the HAL logotype font)
The digital version is available via Monotype.
Most of the small type on the computer screens was typed up on an ordinary (albeit an expensive import from the US) IBM Selectric typewriter, using the Manifold 72 typeball, 10 pitch. This ball had uppercase letters only.
It’s an interesting choice, since the monospaced and nearly single-line font does carry a cold precision to it. It definitely conveys the look of an unsentimental engineering document, and mostly lacks the occasional fussy serifs associated with typewriter fonts.
Incidentally, they wisely avoided the now dated “computery” clichés associated with the blocky MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) fonts used on American bank cheques from the 1950s. Much, in a sense, the way HAL’s speaking voice avoided the shrill monotones that computers were supposed to use in most ordinary 1960s science fiction.
An uppercase letter “I” was used for the numeral “1” on the simulated screens, though there was no real need for it – the Selectric had an actual number 1 key, unlike many older manual typewriters. I guess Trumbull just liked the look.
It’s possible the first person to correctly identify this font was the mononymic “Heather,” a commenter on Dave Addey’s blog.
The IBM Selectric typewriter was an ultra high tech machine for the 1960s; a marvel of insanely complicated electromechanical engineering. Type was arranged on interchangeable balls so you could change fonts on the fly. This is a Manifold 72 typeball, made of metal-plated plastic.
There exist at least four amateur digitizations of this font (Karl Tate, Aleksandar Stevanov, Nick Sherman, and one by me; used on this page), based on typewriter sample sheets. Manifold has inspired other renditions, such as Tim Hutchinson and MuirMcNeil’s THD Sentient. It’s never been commercially digitized, so far as I know.
A handful of characters on the simulated screens, mainly Greek letters (delta, phi, pi, etc), were typed using an IBM Selectric “Symbol” typeball.
This was probably the typeball used to type “The World Tonight” text for the video transmission.
Incidentally, did you notice the typo on the opening screen? The fourth line down reads “THe”.
When HAL murders the scientists who are in suspended animation, various medical computer systems flash messages on the screen. These appear to have been done much the same way as the other computer animations, only they weren’t projected on in-set screens, but simply edited into the film footage.
The flashing messages are set in Letraset’s version of Univers 67 (a condensed font), judging by the fairly straight leg of the uppercase R.
Univers is a highly influential sans-serif font, designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1957. Frequently mistaken for Helvetica, it contains a large range of versions in different weights and widths, all identified by numerals. Some modern versions of Univers ditch the numbers in favour of a more conventional naming scheme.
From 1956 to the mid 60s the IBM logo was simply the letters IBM set in a lightly modified Berthold City Bold. The famous horizontal stripes were added later across the logo by designer Paul Rand.
The IBM logo appears three times in the film. It’s on the central control console of the Orion spaceship, it appears on the two tablets seen on the Discovery, and it appears on the arm controller of the spacesuits.
Note that Letraset did publish a logo sheet which included the IBM logo on it. Did the 2001 team use this Letraset logo for the film? Unknown, but possible. Though whether the logo was only sold in black, when the logo appears only as white in the movie, I don’t know. As noted earlier, Letraset was known to create custom prints for customers, so that’s a possibility as well.
A digital version of Berthold City Bold is available from Monotype.
The IBM-branded tablets seen on the Discovery have the words “TELE PAD” in the lower right corner, along with the IBM logo used from 1956 to 1966.
Details are limited in movie framegrabs like the one below of Poole’s tablet, but photos of Bowman’s tablet prop exist in the Kubrick Archives. It’s possible to tell that it’s Bowman’s because the letter Es are a bit bent, and there’s an extra space between TELE and PAD. Poole’s tablet has neither of these issues.
Anyway. The Archives photo shows that the lettering is Letraset Univers 65. It isn’t Helvetica Bold because the Es are slightly too narrow and the P and D slightly too wide. (ie: it matches Univers 65’s proportions)
Although IBM was at the forefront of computing hardware in the 1960s, the firm sold off their personal computing business to Chinese computer giant Lenovo in 2005. Another example of 2001 not entirely predicting the future...
The pushbuttons on the tablet are numbered 1-9 and 0, all in Futura Demi.
The Tele Pads weren’t conceptualized as touchscreen devices. Input was limited to numbered pushbuttons, which presumably would let you select from on-screen menus or the equivalent. A similar user interface was seen on the seatback display on the Orion when Floyd was napping.
The EVA pod has a small plaque on the front port side control panel. The plaque has the “HSD” logo of Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, the British aerospace manufacturer that consulted on 2001, and which actually constructed the EVA pod interior set.
Although you can’t really read the text in the final film, the words “Hawker Siddeley Dynamics” were printed to the right of the logo, in Univers 58. (aka Univers condensed italic) This is clearly visible in unpublished photos in the Kubrick Archives.
Curiously enough, Letraset produced sample logo sheets to promote their custom transfer business – one shown above right – which included the HSD logo on it. It isn’t known if this sample logo was used by the 2001 team.
Hawker Siddeley, builders of the famous Hurricane fighter from WWII and the Harrier jump jet from the 1960s, was swallowed up by a number of mergers and was gone by the early 1990s. Well before 2001.
The tiny paragraph-sized blocks of text on various objects, such as the EVA pod interior walls and exteriors, the space suits packs, the Aries food pack trays, etc, actually use the legalese that was printed on the edges of early 1960s Letraset sheets. The film’s designers just rubbed down these text blocks figuring they’d be too small to be legible in the finished film.
For more details I’ve written up a whole page of nonsense on this esoteric topic.
It took a lot of wading through old British type catalogues to find the font that was used. And from what I can see the boilerplate was set in Monotype Grotesque Condensed 383; a hot metal font. This was never made available by Letraset themselves, though the similar Grotesque 318 was.
The 1990s digitized release of the Monotype Grotesque group of fonts appears to contain 383 under the name Grotesque MT Std Extra Condensed.
Here’s my approximation of the original boilerplate, set using the modern digital font, with all the strange kerning, letterspacing issues, and seeming weight changes emulated.
To shake things up the boilerplate text was often modified so it didn’t look too much like identical blobs of text. They would cut off lines, repeat sections, scratch off random letters, and even overlap sections of a block.
The digital version is available via Monotype and Adobe Fonts.
The spacesuit’s orange chest pack has a bunch of text on it. The smaller stuff is simply the Letraset boilerplate above, but the headings (CHARGING INSTRUCTIONS, REFRIGERATION, etc) are done in one of Letraset’s sans typefaces.
It looks like Univers or Helvetica at first glance, but the R and G don’t match. Some investigation revealed that it’s actually Letraset’s release of Monotype Grotesque 216.
The 1990s digitized release of the Monotype Grotesque group of fonts does not include an exact version of 216. Grotesque MT Std Bold font is similar but is wider. The Letraset version has not been commercially digitized.
There are still a number of lettering examples in the film with fonts that aren’t known or aren’t certain. At least, not to me.
Pan Am Grip Shoes
The “grip shoes” writing looks like it might have been hand painted on the leather. I don’t know what specific font look they were going for.
I also don’t know about the wings. The Pan Am logo itself at the time was just the globe with the stylized “PAN AM” text. Pilots used to wear badges with wings, but I don’t know why they’d put these double wings on the feet of a flight attendant of the future.
Space Station V signage
There’s lots of text on the space station’s walls – DOCUMENTATION, CUSTOMS, ARRIVALS, RECEPTION, PICTUREPHONE, GIFTS, INFORMATION, PASSENGER TELESCOPES, SSTO/USAA/COMPLAN/PHOTOLAB/ASTROGEO, ELEVATOR, COFFEE/BAR, and so on.
This stuff consists of individual letters cut out from thick black acrylic sheet, or something similar, and glued on. The sign below looks like it was probably made from translucent acrylic so it could be backlit, though it never is in the film.
The font used for most of this lettering is quite wide, with an extremely low x-height. There are no Letraset letters that match.
The closest traditional font I’ve found that seems reasonable is Stempel/Klingspor Information Breitfett/Extra Bold Wide, though the letter R’s x-height isn’t as low as the R in the signage. I came across that one in a Nickeloid (London) type specimen book published in the late 1960s. The same book, interestingly, also lists many of the faces used in the film – Futura, Microgramma, Folio, Eurostile...
If anyone has any suggestions as to what they used here I’d love to hear it!
The main text not set in this type are the Hilton Space Station 5 sign, the Howard Johnson “Earthlight Room” restaurant logo, and the Bell System logo.
The first two brands still exist today. Hilton continues to be a major player in the luxury hotel market. Howard Johnson is a hotel sub-brand of another corporation, and not the big US hotel and restaurant chain it once was. Bell System, the giant American telephone company, was broken up in 1983. The logo at the top of this section was used by Bell until 1969.
The “SPACE STATION 5” lettering looks like Folio Bold Condensed to me. The word “HILTON” looks very similar to the original metal type Monotype Grotesque Condensed 383.
Immigration screen
The words “United States Immigration Department” flash up on the screen during the voiceprint ID scene. It looks like something banal like a tightly kerned Letraset Times Bold Italic. Letraset actually had relatively few italic serif faces.
The four points on the screen following the video and the closing screen are, of course, set in Futura Bold.
L’Europeo and Аэрофлот/Aeroflot
One of the background performers on the space station is a flight attendant reading a magazine. She has a black Аэрофлот/Aeroflot bag by her side.
The only thing visible about this magazine in the film itself is the headline of the article she’s reading. It’s difficult to make out, but it might be “Penkovsky si presenta.” This could be a strange joke, since that phrase could read something like “Penkovsky introduces himself” in Italian. Oleg Penkovsky was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer executed in 1963 for spying for the West during the Cold War.
Behind the scenes photos show the flight attendant reading something else, and her bag prominently contains a copy of L’Europeo magazine.
Both of these were actual brands. Aeroflot is to this day the main Russian airline (then state-run by the Soviet government; now mainly controlled by the Russian government), and the brand is written in uppercase Cyrillic in the correct typeface for the logo at the time.
L’Europeo was a fashionable Italian magazine of the day, and its logotype is also correct. It may have been one of the cases where the magazine was asked to contribute a futuristic cover as a prop for the movie. It’s mentioned in Jerome Agel’s compilation that Paris Match magazine contributed a special cover for a magazine prop, but this was never seen in the finished film.
Orion 1B food dispenser signage
The RCA-Whirlpool-branded food dispenser, from which the Pan-Am flight attendant collects the fresh meal trays, has a long list of available options printed on backlit acrylic panels. These include meals and (mostly alcoholic) beverages, 60s style.
The lettering is quite small and hard to read. It looks like it could be Letraset Folio Bold Condensed, but I can’t say that with certainty. The numeric buttons are clearly Microgramma Extended Bold.
The padded yellow squares with chamfered corners are presumably meant to be little storage cupboards or something like that. Each one is labelled with a sequential letter in the lower right.
I’m not sure the font used – possibly Letraset Folio Medium Extended (Bauer) or maybe even Letraset Helvetica Medium Extended (Haas). If it was the latter, then it’d be the sole usage of Helvetica anywhere in the movie, but I haven’t been able to confirm if that font was available from Letraset in the mid 60s. It was by the 70s. Letraset Venus Extra Bold Condensed was sold in the 60s, and that’s another possible candidate.
There looks like there’s also a tiny number to the lower left corner of each letter.
I have transcribed the drinks list, for those interested.
The “RCA” part of the name was dropped in 1966, partway through production of the film, making this logo appearance obsolete by opening night! The logo on the left is the 1962-67 Whirlpool logo, followed by the RCA logo, and finally the Whirlpool wordmark. RCA no longer exists as a real company, though Whirlpool still exists as an American appliance manufacturer.
USAA crest
The USAA (the fictitious United States Astronautics Agency; presumed to be a future equivalent of NASA) logo, seen on embroidered mission patches and also waterslide decals applied to spacesuit hardware, briefcases, etc, has a hand-drawn circle of text. It isn’t known who drew the text.
I have to say that this is not my favourite graphic in the film. The odd spacing of the circles, and the fact there are so many, doesn’t look great. And the rays and stellar blobs are just sort of fussy. But it’s only really ever seen at a distance in the film, so it doesn’t matter much.
Interestingly enough:
(Associate producer) “Victor Lyndon fished from a manila envelope a number of shoulder patches designed to be worn as identification by the astronauts. ... Kubrick said that the lettering didn’t look right, and suggested that the art department make up new patches using actual NASA lettering.”
From The Making of Kubrick’s 2001: edited by Jerome Agel, 1970.
BBC 12
The BBC 12 logo flashing up on the IBM Tele Pad display was a sly aside to British audiences, because of course in the mid 1960s there were only two British Broadcasting Corporation TV channels, with BBC2 being a brand new addition. So naturally in the future we’d have 12! Not exactly what transpired in real life, of course.
Here’s the Tele Pad logo rotated and skewed to vertical compared to the mid-sixties BBC logo.
At the time the BBC logo consisted of the three letters, in a bold italic sans, set within three parallelograms. So the BBC 12 logo was a clever updating of the design, with the letters aligned to the box-like shapes within the verticals, and not aligned to the character baselines.
I haven’t been able to match either the letters BBC or the numerals 1 and 2 to any Letraset font. The letters look similar to Univers heavy condensed italic, though the letter C has different geometry.
Medical monitor screen
The animated status displays for the hibernating scientists feature various labels in a bold condensed type. I can’t see a match for it in Letraset type available in the mid 60s, or any common British typeface really.
So there you have it. A thoroughly detailed breakdown of all the known fonts used in 2001: a Space Odyssey. Like most stuff associated with the film, it was careful, thoughtful and inspired design that helped significantly with the worldbuilding and sense of reality. It was built from typographical products available in mid 1960s Britain, but was also their idea of what a future could be.
Fortunately, it didn’t come out in the 1970s, so we’re spared goofy fake computer OCR fonts and other typographical excesses of the era.
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