Your brain builds a very personal and emotional impression of the collection of letters that make words that convey meaning. In the case of terminal or coding typefaces, the design goal is certainly to provide structural function and not feeling, but here’s the deal:
Flight to New York. My boarding procedure for moderate to long flights is: sit down, find a movie I’ve seen a dozen times, and hit play. No sound. This is visual background noise while I sort wifi, prepare for a meal, and find a project. On this flight, I picked Blade Runner. Fun fact: I can recite 50% of the dialogue from this movie from memory.
As I’ve been researching typography for Ghostty, novel typography tends to jump out at me. Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road. Except it’s typography.
Here are clips from the title sequence for Blade Runner:
There’s a lot to dissect in this sequence, but let’s start with the punchline. This is a single typeface. It’s Goudy Oldstyle — that’s it. However, this is how they used typography:
Keep looking. The crawl is set like a book, not a movie — first-line indents, generous word spacing — and Frederic Goudy would approve: they letterspace the caps, never the lowercase, obeying his famous dictum that “anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep.”5 Also, what’s up with that chonky em dash? It’s probably been years since you’ve seen this, so here it is again:
Unlike our functional fixed-width typefaces, the role of typography in this title sequence is partly functional — to set the story — but the primary purpose is establishing mood. Director Ridley Scott expertly drops us into the middle of a dystopian future where we’ve enslaved the robots and, duh, they are rebelling.
Chances are, you never think about typography. You happily scribe your Messages (SF Pro), Mails (Helvetica), and Slacks (Lato), thinking nothing of serifs, ligatures, or kerning. You are content trusting that a someone else has chosen a proper typeface for your current task. Maybe you bold, you underline, and you italicize to slightly adjust meaning. No issue. Respect.
However, we now live in a world where everyone is capable of building whatever they want thanks to the robots. They’re doing it — right now. They find immense joy in typing in a couple of sentences and watching the robots merrily build whatever they ask. See? I don’t need to be an engineer to build an app. And they are correct. Sorta.
With optimism in my heart and a firm belief that the robots can legitimately help many humans, I can confirm that the majority of consumer-facing things being built by humans who’ve never built a thing… are garbage. Building a tool for yourself? A quick script to read your feeds and generate a pleasant-to-read output? A+. Robots crush that… for you. Building a feed reader anyone on the planet can easily use to read any number of feeds? No. No, you aren’t; you can say you are, but until you’ve built a thing for everyone, you will not appreciate that the last 10% of the work:
Don’t believe me? Here’s the first version of the title sequence for Blade Runner’s work print, the close-to-complete cut before the theatrical release:
That title typeface? Impact. A fine typeface, but a clumsy path-of-least-resistance slap-to-the-face choice to set the tone of a future science fiction masterpiece. Garbage6.
I’ve never filmed a movie, but I have built quite a few products that you are using right now. In all the design debates, we never explicitly debate feeling: we obsess over the details. That obsession is what you feel when you use our products. It’s the collective voice of every single human who contributed small and large decisions to the product.
A good product sounds like the humans who created it, and that’s what you will feel.
# August 5, 2026
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