“Ready Player One” is the eagerly awaited film adaptation of the bestselling novel by Ernest Cline, directed by Steven Spielberg and released by Warner Bros. in 2018. Pentagram has designed the movie’s logo, a maze-like wordmark that hints at the film’s exciting story set in a sci-fi world of virtual gaming.
The design of the logo takes its cues from the “Ready Player One” narrative, which takes place in the dystopian future of 2045, when the U.S. is an energy-starved wasteland and people escape into a virtual reality called OASIS that contains worlds inspired by the pop culture of the 1980s. The protagonists must solve a series of puzzles, challenges and riddles to find the “Easter Egg” and win the OASIS creator’s life-changing fortune.
The characters of “Ready Player One” are obsessed with pop culture, and the book is packed with references to movies, television, music, comics and video games. To create the logo, the Pentagram team researched visuals related to everything mentioned in the novel, as well as “Ready Player One” fan art inspired by the book. This ranged from 1980s arcade games and digital 8-bit graphics to record covers, movie posters, and comic books.
The logo transforms the title into a working maze. The journey starts with the tail of the R, which spills into a labyrinth that twists and turns around letterforms that have been extended to connect with each other. The look of the custom typography ties into the logo for OASIS seen in the movie, and is burnished with shiny effects reminiscent of logos for arcade games. The designers carefully considered the counters and strokes of the letters and the positive and negative space to create a balance. The Easter Egg can be found at the end of the maze, in the counter of the “O.”
