Semiotic Standard: the icons from Alien · Lexie's space

After finishing up the first version of our Solar System transit map, we went looking for another vector art project - something to further hone our skills, and ideally something that would also be of interest to someone other than ourself.

We fairly quickly settled on recreating the “Semiotic Standard” icon set. If you don’t know what that is, that’s okay! You’ve probably seen part of it before now, but not many have heard the name.

If you’ve seen the film Alien , you may have noticed, here and there in the various compartments of the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo , various icons - squarish things, done in blocky colors, that seemed to be indicating different features of the ship.

You may not have noticed them, too! They’re not called attention to at any point in the movie; they’re just there , implicitly expanding the narrative in the best science-fiction tradition. Their presence says that these ships need to be comprehensible to crew members who may not share a language, who may not be familiar with the particular vessel on which they happen to be, who may be dealing with a life-threatening emergency and need to be able to find things right now . And, like many examples of this implicit sort of storytelling, they’ve drawn a degree of attention in their own right, quite aside from the larger narrative in which they are embedded.

Typeset in the Future’s Alien article discusses in somewhat more detail how these icons relate to Alien as a whole, so we won’t go further into that here. But ever since we noticed their presence in the film, the icons themselves have fascinated us. So, when we remembered that Typeset in the Future also had scans of the original sketches from which the icons were derived, we realized that our next vector art project had found us!

We’ll have a lot more to say about this in the near future, and we’ll also be providing a collection of large SVG files of these icons, for reuse in your own projects. (We’ve been printing them on stickers and putting them up in our house! Our coffee machine is now instantly identifiable as such, even in a depressurization emergency.)

But for now, we wanted to get a quick post up linking to the full set at a suitable size for use as Mastodon emoji, so that we can share them with our friends across the fediverse. To use them on your instance, point your admin to that link and ask them to import the file with tootctl emoji import ; they’ll know what you mean from there.

That’s all for now. We hope you enjoy them! And watch this space; we’ll have a more detailed post up soon, along with the package of vector files.

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