Alien

Typeface: Helvetica Black, created in 1957 by Max Meidinger

Helvetica is known as the “invisible” typeface due to its neutral nature and abundance in use. It’s so ubiquitous that it inspired an award-winning documentary by the same name, released in 2007 to coincide with the typeface’s 50th anniversary. The film explains that Meidinger set out to create a typeface that “had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage.” Given Helvetica’s incredible popularity to this day, one can posit that Meidinger’s plan was a success.

How such an unassuming typeface came to represent one of the most iconic sci-fi horror films to date shows the utter flexibility of the design. Often incorrectly attributed to prolific graphic designer Bill Gold, the theatrical poster was actually designed by Steve Frankfurt and Philip Gips of Bemis Balkind (to Gold’s credit, he did design a concept poster for the film that was ultimately rejected). The design firm adopted the lettering from Richard Greenberg’s title sequence for the film, which brilliantly used the structure of the typeface to build the ominous mood of the film.

“Steve Frankfurt once said to me that sound is 50% of a film and I agree with that. So we abstracted the idea of the off-putting sound but in a typographic way,” Greenberg explained in an interview with Art of the Title. “We wanted to set up tension and as these little bits come in, they seem very mechanical...When the bits finally resolve into a word, I think people weren’t prepared to read it as a title because of the spacing.”