Ron Cobb, from his hand drawn original Semiotic Standard for Alien
For all commercial trans-stellar utility lifter
and heavy element transport spacecraft.
— April 16, 2078
Background
When I saw Alien (1979) for the first time,
I was deeply impressed.
Not, that I recognized it then,
but the crew, the mission, the ship,
everything felt far more real
than what I was familiar with from series like Star Trek.
In opposite to the tidy, sterile Enterprise
the Nostromo was dark, dirty and noisy.
As an interstellar mining "truck" it was absolutely credible.
One aspect of this dense impression
was surely the work of Ron Cobb,
who not only created most (if not all)
of Nostromo's interior design,
but who's exterior design sketch for the ship
was used, too.
I tend to subscribe to the idea that form follows
function.
If I'm to arrive at a cinematic spacecraft design
that seamlessly preserves, as in this case,
the drama of the script,
the audience has to experience it
as something impressive and believable.
My method for designing the Nostromo
interiors was to emulate the engineering
of the entire landing shuttle as though it were real,
from the interior to the exterior and back again.
Recently I learned about the
Semiotic Standard,
the "icon" set Ron designed
to label Nostromo's doors and doorways.
From Ron Cobb, hand drawn original Semiotic Standard.From Ron Cobb, hand drawn original Semiotic Standard.
"Typeset In The Future"
has a wonderful analysis
of much of Ron's (and others'?) work on the
Nostromo
(and on Alien in general).
Motivation
There are some well-done digitalized versions
of Ron's original designs,
from mostly accurate (e.g. the non-square aspect ratio)
to more modern, fancy variants.
So it was not really necessary
to recreate yet another Semiotic Standard icon set.
But at the time I read the
Typeset-In-The-Future Alien
article, I was not aware of them,
and I decided such an icon set has to be created.
The ideas behind it and their realization were so
brillant, they deserve to be preserved.
Such a clean and consistent design is a rarity nowadays,
i.e. when icons automatically are cropped circular
to provide sense of common design.
I am not a designer and I did not work often
with vector graphics before.
It challenged me, and if I have enough time,
I enjoy challenges.
Furthermore I felt recreating these icons as authentic
as possible were a good way of adoration
for Ron's masterstroke.
Procedure
The journey is the reward.
I began naively,
not even following the original aspect ratio,
just playing around with
Inkscape
on some first few icons.
That turned out to be a good decision,
based on my poor knowledge of Inkscape.
Later, then prepared with a little more experience,
I started the final approach.
I used Inkscape's cloning and attribute inheritance a lot,
making it easier to change attributes for all icons
at once (colors, rounded corners, etc.).
I am pretty satisfied with what I learned
and what I had achieved so far. :-)
Results
Ron Cobb's hand drawn originalRon Cobb's hand drawn original
