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Michael Okuda helped make the future of Star Trek look like a place people could actually work in. His graphic designs gave the franchise’s displays, labels, and interfaces a visual language, first on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and then across The Next Generation and later series. In an October 2026 interview with Space, Okuda revisits that work, including the Enterprise-D bridge rebuilt for Star Trek: Picard season 3.
How Okuda got his first Star Trek assignment
Okuda’s route into the franchise began with a visual problem. While working in corporate graphics, he noticed that the Enterprise’s round screens were often paired with rectangular information layouts. He sketched alternatives for his own amusement, then mailed the drawings to Paramount. Producer Ralph Winter later offered him work on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, his first job on the franchise, according to the official StarTrek.com interview.
That film also helped lead to his longer run in television. After The Voyage Home, Gene Roddenberry invited Okuda to consider the newly announced Star Trek: The Next Generation. The encounter led to his hiring for the series. The story is a practical example of how a small design intervention—one artist responding to a mismatch between a screen’s shape and the information on it—could open a path into a production’s larger visual world.
What a Star Trek graphics designer actually does
Fans often call the franchise’s interface graphics “Okudagrams,” and the Next Generation-era interface system is widely known as LCARS. The labels are useful shorthand, but Okuda’s work was broader than designing a single kind of screen. He says he led graphics design from The Next Generation through Enterprise. Denise Okuda, describing her own work in the graphics department and later video playback supervision, explains how the discipline expanded over time.
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From static detail to moving displays
Early graphics work included labels and details placed on props and sets. As production needs grew, the work extended to animated displays operating on set and graphics added in post-production. A screen could function as set dressing, communicate information to performers, or help a scene feel as if it belonged to a consistent technological environment. Those uses are related, but they involve different production needs: a prop graphic must read in the frame, while an animated display also has to work in time with the action.
A coherent interface, built with a team
Okuda’s designs helped make the technology feel connected across the fictional world, but he did not design every bridge, ship, or set by himself. The official account of the Next Generation production names production designers Herman Zimmerman and Richard James among the artists and designers involved. Graphics were one layer of a collaborative production-design effort, alongside the physical sets, props, costumes, lighting, and camera work.
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The production history also accumulated between shows. Sets, props, and costumes could be reused or redressed for later productions, so a detail created for one story might become part of another story’s visual vocabulary. That reuse is a reminder that the world seen on screen is not built anew from nothing each time; it develops through both deliberate design and the practical continuity of production.
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In the 2026 Space interview, Okuda singles out several projects that mattered personally: the Enterprise bridge in The Voyage Home, the bridge interfaces on The Next Generation, and the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations.” The choices span a film, the series that established his long television role, and a later episode that revisited an earlier era of the franchise.
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He also describes helping rebuild the Enterprise-D bridge for the third season of Picard. Production designer Dave Blass called former collaborators together, and the team rebuilt the bridge from scratch. For Okuda, returning to that familiar environment was emotional: “And you know, they say you can’t go home again, but just for a moment you could. Oh, it was so wonderful.”
The bridge is a particularly clear illustration of the difference between designing an interface and designing an entire set. Okuda’s graphics are part of what makes the environment recognizable, but the bridge’s physical form and its screen imagery work together. The screen details contribute to the impression that the room is a functioning workplace; they are not a substitute for the production-design collaboration that creates the room itself.
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Why the graphics helped the future feel real
Science-fiction interfaces have to do two jobs at once: suggest technology beyond the viewer’s present and remain legible enough to support a scene. Repeated visual choices—how information is arranged, how displays fit into a set, and how graphics recur from one production to another—help create continuity. The result can make a fictional system feel as though it has rules, rather than appearing as a collection of unrelated futuristic screens.
Okuda sees that role as part of the franchise’s broader effect. “I think the biggest contribution was as graphic artist for ‘Star Trek,’ simply because ‘Star Trek’ had such an impact. And ‘Star Trek’ was one of the first shows that understood that graphics really helped define the universe.” The point is not that graphics alone create a believable future, but that they can help make a world feel consistent enough for its stories to inhabit.
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The hopeful outlook of the franchise remains important to him, too. “I think that’s the thing that I try not to lose sight of.” In a story about screens and set details, that perspective explains why the design work matters beyond visual polish: the technology is part of a future imagined around people, their choices, and what they might build together.
Where to explore Okuda’s work further
For readers interested in the production logic behind fictional technology, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, co-authored by Okuda, is a relevant next read. It is a focused way to explore the series’ technical worldbuilding, not a complete account of his career. The older StarTrek.com page also describes The Next Generation – On Board the U.S.S. Enterprise, a book and CD-ROM package with cutaway diagrams, floor plans, photographs, artifacts, and a 3D tour; its current edition, format, and availability are not established by that page. The official Star Trek Shop books collection is another place to check for current titles and editions.
Space’s 2026 interview was published in connection with the franchise’s 60th anniversary, which it identifies as September 8, 2026. It is an interview excerpt that points to the full This Week In Space episode for readers who want more of Okuda’s own account.
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