Star Trek: Discovery’s Title Designer Talks Iconography and Easter Eggs
Star Trek: Discovery’s opening credits are visually striking, and set apart from prior series stylistically. They’re also Emmy-nominated.
In an interview on IndieWire this week, Ana Criado, the title designer for Star Trek: Discovery talked about how she and her team decided on the now-instantly-recognizable blueprint style, and about how they integrated symbolic items from the show into the opening sequence.
Criado herself has an impressive catalog of film and TV title sequences to her name. In addition to Discovery, she has also designed titles for Elementary and American Horror Story, as well as the films Godzilla, World War Z, and the Twilight Saga’s finale: Breaking Dawn - part 2. She even did the title sequence for the Oscars in 2017.
So when it came to tackling something like Star Trek, where did she begin? She said, “It didn’t seem like a huge challenge until I started to know more about ‘Star Trek’ and then I said, ‘OK, this isn’t gonna be easy.’ We were lucky that we found this idea of blueprints and it fit in perfectly with the concept of the TV show. It’s a prequel, so it leaves its own space to create and to present the elements that everybody knows.”
The sepia tones of the sequence, she said, related to the Renaissance, and are meant to feel like everything is being designed from scratch, literally deconstructing familiar Trek objects. A challenge of season 2 was updating the elements of the season 1 sequence so that it was still relevant to the show. One of the first things the team decided on was the captain’s chair. Criado said, “It was one of the most important pieces that they wanted to show. It was iconic for the fans, because it’s related to a new captain. [...] We tried different representations, but the one that we chose — with the balance of the transparent, X-ray parts of the chair and the solid parts — they fit together perfectly.” Criado also noted, “We did put some easter eggs for the fans in that part, if they want to look closely.”
Among other new additions to the opening credits were the Red Angel suit and the three Starfleet deltas on a transporter pad. You can view the full sequence for yourself on CBS All Access or other streaming services around the globe. As for Criado, she and her team are now working on titles for Discovery season three and Star Trek: Picard.
This article was written for the podcast Daily Star Trek News.
Alison Pitt is the writer, producer, and host of Daily Star Trek News, on the Roddenberry Podcast Network. A veteran Star Trek podcaster, she started her career on the weekly show Priority One: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast in 2015. She has appeared on panels at Star Trek Las Vegas, WonderCon, and San Diego Comic Con.
