Houston, Futura has landed.

I generally get a kick out of looking at the evidence of humanity that we have thrown around the Solar System, so with the Apollo 11 Moon landing anniversary just past I thought I would look at the the first words brought to the Moon by it – the Apollo 11 Lunar plaque.

Like all of the Lunar plaques brought by the Apollo missions this is a 9” x 7 5/8” stainless steel plaque, attached to the Lunar Module’s ladder.  It features the signatures of the three astronauts, the President on the United States, and a message of peace.  Classy look message eh?  You might recognize the lettering from the titles of Stanley Kubrick’s films, or more recently Wes Anderson’s work.  Like the Saturn V rockets that carried men to the moon, the font on the plaques they brought with them, Futura, was designed by a German.

Futura was designed by Paul Renner, and release to the public in 1927.  It’s a very clean geometric font.  No extra serifs, frills, or decorations are found. Now, I’m not a font expert by any means so I can’t go into the details of what exactly sets Futura apart from other fonts of the time, and how the various child-fonts it has spawned  differ from each other.  What I can say is that despite being a 86 year old typeface it still, to me at least, looks to the future, a future perhaps when the Apollo 17 plaque won’t be the last words we left on the Moon.



Right now this 41 year old plaque from Apollo 17 in an 86 year old typeface are the last words humanity personally left behind on the Moon.