Gallery: How Arrival's Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet

  • ARRIVAL
    Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures
    01

    Arrival3.jpg

    In Denis Villeneuve's *Arrival*, Amy Adams plays a linguist trying to communicate with alien visitors.
  • ARRIVAL
    Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures
    02

    Arrival5.jpg

    The aliens, or Heptapods, speak in indecipherable clicks. So Louise Banks (Adams) begins documenting and analyzing their written language, which looks like coffee mug stains with protruding tarantula legs.
  • ARRIVAL
    Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures
    03

    Arrival4.jpg

    Patrice Vermette is the designer who created the logogram language, with help from his wife, artist Martine Bertrand.
  • ARRIVAL
    Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures
    04

    Arrival2.jpg

    Vermette always knew the alien language would appear in circles—*Arrival* screenwriter Eric Heisserer specified so in the script. The trick was creating something that wouldn't register as human, but that could follow some set of rules.
Read More
How Apple Puts Indigenous Languages on the iPhone Keyboard
To save endangered languages, tech companies like Apple are working with Indigenous communities to meet the next generation where they type.
Julian Chokkattu
Artificial Roasts AI’s Creators—and Sends a Dark Warning About Its Dangers
From their dorky parties to their weird walks, the movie holds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other stakeholders with contempt, while demonstrating their recklessness.
John Semley
the case for lowercase
a certain kind of person writes in all lowercase now. why?
Tiffany Ng
WIRED Ghost Stories
Five hauntings from the other side of technology.
Dune: Part Three’s Cowriter Has a New Comic on the Way
Brian K. Vaughan claims he’s seen Dune: Part Three and it’s “a fucking beautiful movie.”
Angela Watercutter
Digger Is a Box Office Flop. It Might Be the Most Relevant Film of the Year
Sold by its trailer as a gag reel, Tom Cruise’s strangest movie may be the most unsettling portrait of our tech and climate moment yet.
Carla Sertin
Anthropic Says It Will Revolutionize Biology—Some Day
In breathless press releases and posts, the company has touted its models’ ability to deliver scientific breakthroughs. But its IPO filing taps the brakes on just how fast its AI will lead to big discoveries.
Emily Mullin
The New ChatGPT Is More Show Than Tell
OpenAI is updating ChatGPT for all users with an “Intelligent UI” that’s more visual—generating interactive elements as part of the chatbot’s outputs.
Reece Rogers
These Researchers Made AI Drive a Toyota Corolla to Get In-N-Out
Three engineers put GPT, Claude, and Grok in charge of a real car. Only one of them was successful.
Will Knight
Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.
Joel Khalili
Even Law & Order Is Terrified of AI
In its 26th season premiere, the procedural legal drama paints a damning picture of power-mad AI CEOs.
Ej Dickson
Muse Wonder Puts Meta Back at the AI Frontier
Meta’s biggest model rivals the world’s best—and includes new features to keep agents from going off the rails.
Will Knight