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  • The skyline was inspired by north east England, Middlesbrough Teesside. ICI was one of the largest chemical sites in the world. Ridley Scott had studied at Teesside Polytechnic and took inspiration from the Imperial Chemical Industries that over looked Middlesbrough. One side of the skyline in the area you see towers and smoke billows and roaring flames, the other picturesque north Yorkshire moors and Odins Mount. Quite a contrast.
  • 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.

  • > I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.

    Tangential but I've been enjoying GNU Unifont for this purpose. I like the look of it and it does a good job supporting a huge range of characters. Terminals warn me that it's not technically monospace, but for all intents and purposes in a terminal windows it is. I have it as the default bundled font with a project that renders custom glyphs on the fly for display on real VT320 hardware as DRCS.

  • > Chances are, you never think about typography.

    Probably not true for most of the people reading a blog post about typography

  • This is interesting for me as the author mentions in the opening line that he basically is a slave to the machine theirself and the only freedom they got is in choosing the font space of their user interface.

    And then they go on about the intricate details of some artistic choice 40 years ago. How the human touch and deliberate decisions were made..it all eclipsing in it being about a movie where the machine rebelled.

  • 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.
  • 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 effectively immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.

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