Fly Like a Falcon

Apparently I'm still standing at the busy intersection of Film and Design, because I find myself admiring the fanaticism of Chris Lee and his friends in Tennessee, who have dedicated themselves to building a life-size Millennium Falcon, as seen in the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Stats:

7—number of people in Lee's core team
88—number of acres of land Lee owns, on which the Falcon is being built
114—feet, the length of the Falcon when completed

What a puzzle they've set out to solve, as they smack right into the difference between designing models and sets for a film and designing an object for the real world. The short version: nothing seen in the films of the Falcon's exterior and interior actually fit together. But they never had to. They just had to look cool—and at that, every ship and set built for those films was wildly successful.

So much so that I believe George Lucas' real contribution to our culture was not his own derivative, overcooked (or is half-baked?) mythos of the Skywalker clan. It was the designers he hired, who, in crafting compelling, believable things out of plywood and sound effects, inspired a mass awakening to design itself. These designers and builders made us want to design and make cool things.

My lifelong interest in film, design, architecture, even fonts, started there, with a childhood obsession for the blueprints, deck plans and technical manuals published in the 1970s for the Star Trek and Star Wars universes. Not only did their precision lend weight to the illusion that these ships were real, somewhere in space and time, they showed me that the art of representing design on paper is beautiful in its own right. They even gave me an unconscious appreciation for how the form of visual communications itself has a narrative—how a hasty pencil sketch conveys a totally different meaning from a formal, authoritative blueprint. They definitely taught me how visual storytelling can enhance and extend written storytelling.

As for fonts, it was the 1970s Star Trek Technical Manual that taught me the name "Microgramma" for the typeface used on the Enterprise's insignia. I've long since moved on from thinking much about Star Trek, but I do still think about fonts and what they mean quite often.

Example 1: It drives me crazy when the numbers on a speedometer are italicized. Is that supposed to make me feel like I'm going really fast?

Example 2: With everyone going gaga for Mid-century Modernism, I eagerly await Microgramma's second coming. Seems slow to happen. I have to content myself with the leftover examples in Honolulu from its first go-around. Did you know the house rules for Century Center, built in 1978, still require Microgramma for business signs? Century Center, I like your standards.

HT: Huffingtonpost.com video on the Falcon crew, via the new HuffPost Hawaii site.