Cyberpunk vs FUI (Fantasy User Interface)
サイバーパンク / 架空ユーザーインターフェース
Cyberpunk comes from Visions of the Future and FUI (Fantasy User Interface) from UI Expression. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Cyberpunk
Advanced technology and ruined daily life share the same frame, so the future arrives as promise and as threat.
FUI (Fantasy User Interface)
The name that stuck to the craft of making the screens that appear inside films. It spread around the work of Mark Coleran, who says he is given credit for the term without being sure he can take it, and who describes these screens as illustration and a storytelling device that was never designed to be used. He works with light, shape, form, movement and sound so that each film screen has one thing the audience is meant to read.
| Cyberpunk | FUI (Fantasy User Interface) | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1980s– | 1997– |
| Family | Visions of the Future | UI Expression |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Rainy nights / Multilingual neon / Dense cabling / Dark cities | One thing per screen that the audience is meant to read, with everything else present as density / Columns of monospaced figures updating continuously while computing nothing / Thin luminous lines on black, with shapes drawn as outlines and almost no fill / Frames and controls that look like plausible equipment rather than pure abstraction |
| Best used for | Speaking of technology's light and shadow together · Thick world-building for games and film | Designing a screen that has to be read in the few seconds an actor is looking at it · Designing the display of a device that does not exist, as a picture that never has to work |
| Type | Angular sans, monospace, multiple scripts | Lead with monospace and let most of the text act as texture. Only the word that must be read changes size and brightness. |
| Composition | Stack information densely on dark planes | Decide the one thing to be read first and aim the light and the motion at it. Fill the rest with density that carries no meaning. |
| Material | Black, teal, red neon, raindrops | One or two luminous colours on black, thin strokes, almost no fill. Pull the brightness down so the screen sits inside the photographed shot. |
| Caution | Don't use Asian cities as a symbol of otherness. Make the fictional social order concrete. | Trying to make the screen genuinely operable thins out the density and scatters the information, and it stops being readable in the length of the performance. |