Meet The Visual Futurist Who Drew Tomorrow Before It Arrived, and Taught Cinema What the Future Should Look Like
Syd Mead (1933–2019) was an American “visual futurist” who designed future cities, vehicles and technologies. Many of them became the look of late‑20th‑century science fiction.
Mead’s first feature film was Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), where he visualized the interior of the V’Ger entity. Ridley Scott hired him for Blade Runner after seeing a collection of his work in a London bookshop. For the credits, Mead came up with the title “Visual Futurist”. He later said he had spent 20 years on mostly future-oriented visuals when he chose it.
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His industrial-design background gave his film work a sense of weight and plausibility. A recurring description of his style is that it makes the extraordinary feel entirely possible. He retired in September 2019 after sixty years of design work and died at home in Pasadena on December 30, 2019.
