The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part II: Television and Film, 1987-2003

Continued from last week's discussion of the original tv show and films, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager...

The return of Star Trek to the small screen with 1987's premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation brought with it a new logo with a new font... the most 1980stastic of fonts:

I know people who hate this typeface for its period-ness with the burning passion of a thousand suns; I've never had a strong opinion on it because, like the fonts for the original, it's been the font of Star Trek: The Next Generation as long as I can remember. That's just how the TNG logo looks, how could it look otherwise? (More on that in, uh, part IV, I think.) It doesn't even look very 1980s to me, to be honest. In the process of researching this post, however, I came across a fan-made font that retro-engineers what a non-italicized version of it would look like.

Defamiliarize it like that, and suddenly my reaction is, "Wow! That is so 1980s... and kinda bad." (In fairness to the real font, I should point out that this guy 80s it up a bit: the real one doesn't have the gap in the S, for example, and he makes the corner of the A more square than it ought to be. Also in fairness to the real font, they knew not to use the gaps in the subtitle.)

The TNG font was never used on any other Star Trek productions.

(Weirdly, though, just days after publishing this, I was reading DC Cybernetic Summer #1 (Sept. 2020), when I suddenly recognized the A in the cover blurb... it randomly uses the TNG font for its blurb! That's the subtitle version, so it doesn't have the horizontal gap in it, but once you notice the A, it's obvious. How random.)

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When The Next Generation went to the big screen with 1994's Star Trek Generations, "Serpentine" was the font of choice for the words "Star Trek" on the poster. This is the first time that a Star Trek used an off-the-shelf font for a logo instead of a bespoke one, and it can be seen in a plethora of logos for other tv shows and films, including Lethal Weapon (1987), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and InuYasha (2002). I always think primarily of Babylon 5 (1993) when I see it: 

Babylon 5 also used it to display its credits, so it's a pretty strong association.

The later Next Generation movies largely kept up this trend:

As you can see, the first three all paired Serpentine with a narrow sans serif, and then Nemesis with something Yves Peters calls, "a digitally stretched Handel Gothic-like font." Peters also says, "Serpentine shares the (almost) monoline aspect and the tiny triangular serifs with the original movie lettering, but its squarish structure projects a far less elegant, more brutish image." The subtitle fonts adds to that brutish impression in all four cases. I don't think any of these will ever be my favorite Star Trek logos, but I do like the contrast, especially in the Generations one. (I think I have a lot of nostalgia for that movie-- less the movie itself, and more the marketing, since that was the first Star Trek movie release I was really cognizant of. I had the YA novel, and the MicroMachine set, and a couple action figures.)

As with the original films, the TNG ones used different logos within the actual movies, but in these cases they're completely different, with no fonts in common with the poster logos at all. The first two films used ITC Benguiat, a classy serif font:

I think it's that cross-bar on the "A" that I really like. (Fun fact: ITC Benguiat is actually the font used in the Stranger Things logo!) These logos were not, as far I know, used on any merchandising or tie-ins for the films-- but ITC Benguiat was used as the typeface for the logos on the Star Trek: Destiny novels in 2008, in a style imitating the arrangement of the Generations logo.

Insurrection used a different but pretty similar serif font, ITC Elan, for the "STAR TREK" part of the title, though I like it less:

I don't think ITC Elan has been used elsewhere in Star Trek. The sans serif used for "INSURRECTION" is pretty bland.

Star Trek Nemesis introduced, however, a flat-out abomination for its film logo:

Like, what in hell is that? A backwards "R" and "E"?? Why??? It looks too hard like it's trying to be "kewl"; is this born of the same thought process that gave us the dune buggy chase???? It's a font called "Exocet," which was until 2006 the typeface of the Tazo tea logo.

Watching it in the actual film, which you can do here (the logo begins to appear at 00:34), is even worse. I think they're going for something involving mirroring, a theme that is (like much in the film) half-assed, but I don't think it really works. I was pretty amazed to discover that this title sequence is by Richard Greenberg... the man who also came up with literally the greatest title sequence of all time in Superman: The Movie! I guess they can't all be winners.

This logo has never been used anywhere else.

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The last pre-CBS All Access television show was Enterprise in 2001 (not Star Trek: Enterprise until, weirdly, the third episode of season three in 2003).

This logo is pretty neat, because the font here is original to Star Trek, even though it had never been used in a logo before. It's actually an adapted version of the font used for the hull markings on most Starfleet vessels since Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

The major change is that it doesn't have the outline that characterizes "Starfleet Bold Extended" (also known as "Millennium Bold Extended"), itself a variant of "Microgramma." I like the callback, and I think it looks good. Enterprise got a lot of crap for omitting the "Star Trek" from the title at first, but really, I think it makes sense, in that could a show called "Enterprise" be anything other than a Star Trek show? The use of the very font the word "Enterprise" had been consistently written in since 1979 only served to confirm that.

(Oddly, though, the actual NX-01 Enterprise in Enterprise did not use this typeface! As part of its retro prequel stylings, Enterprise used "Machine Extended" for Starfleet hull markings, which otherwise was only used in the original 1960s show.)

The downside of the logo, however, is that it's very wide and thus very short; I think it looks kind of teeny on things like book covers because it takes up so little height. Compare it to the narrow letters of the original series, or the stacked forms of the other ones. This was somewhat remedied with the belated introduction of the words "Star Trek" to the series name:

I think this logo is fine, but something in me always thinks they should haven't caved to the haters and added "Star Trek"! (Everything else about the show is still bad, though.)

This is another logo that's largely unique, but as I'll discuss in part IV, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers books worked with something similar, though not quite the same.

On to three weeks later's discussion of Discovery, Picard, and other CBS All Access shows...