OUR SPACESHOP’S OSCILLOSCOPE LOGO CAN BE DECIPHERED BY INTELLIGENT HUMANS, AND CURIOUS INTERGALACTIC VISITORS.
When Denis Villeneuve was adapting Ted Chiang’s short story ‘Story of Your Life’ into the film Arrival, he needed to invent a language for the Heptapods – the alien beings onboard the big egg-like crafts, who experience time not as a straight line, but as a circle.
So production designer Patrice Vermette, art director Aaron Morrison, and graphic designer Martine Bertrand, built a system of circular logograms, from scratch.
Equal parts art, linguistics, and speculative design, each symbol is a dense, complex shape with no beginning or end, plugging into the Heptapods’ non-linear perception of time.
It was not only brilliantly smart, it was also a thing of beauty.
So to accompany the launch of the Vollebak Spaceshop, we set out to create our own logogram alphabet.
We wanted a system that could be deciphered by humans, or any curious intergalactic visitors. So we landed on the idea of using an oscilloscope.
Oscilloscopes visualise changes in voltage as oscillating waveforms on an X-Y grid, and are used anywhere electricity flows and needs decoding, from spacecraft diagnostics to tuning audio equipment.
Instead of testing circuits, we plugged in a microphone and used the oscilloscope to visualise the voice of our Co-founder, Nick Tidball.
That created a unique alphabet of jagged forms, symmetrical on one axis. Our logo uses this universal sign language to spell out “Spaceshop” whilst also looking like a pulsing transmission from deep space.
