Galactic Style Guide – Viewscreens and Datapads II

Happy Christmas everyone, and welcome back to the Galactic Style Guide, the monthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more accurate ‘outer persona’! In this month’s installment (our final post of 2021!) we’re wrapping up our look at those ubiquitous pieces of ‘hard kit’, datapads and viewscreens. While datapads have really taken off in the last couple years (since visitors to the Galaxy’s Edge parks started kitbash-decorating phone cases), if you’re only familiar with them from fanmade creations, you may be surprised to see that the MANY visual examples we have from licensed sources are detailed very differently!

From an in-universe visuals sense, these three examples are perhaps the most accurate homemade ‘datapads’ I’ve seen yet. What is it that makes them so well-done?

Watto’s datapad gives a good feel for an appropriate level of embellishment… selection keys on the front and a repeated figure on the back, but definitely not chaotically random or asymmetrical (we see Watto holding this when we first meet him, and in the junkyard scene with Qui-Gon).

As we can see here, the rear faces of the viewscreens used to watch the Boonta Eve Classic in 32 BBY are also quite modest and unadorned…a far cry from the steampunk-greeblies approach to kitbashing seen on the majority of homemade ‘datapads’. But these examples are only passive viewscreens, not military datapads. Perhaps those devices have more busy rear faces?

If we look at perhaps our largest and most detailed analyzable sample, we can see that while they range from pocket size at top left (Rogue Squadron #21) to large iPad size, the rear faces of datapads in various later Dark Horse comics (Empire, Rebellion, etc.) are quite consistent.
In this late-EU iteration, datapads are almost uniformly shown as blue-gray and their rear faces are hardly what one could call ‘busy’. While typical features include limited asymmetrical raised panels and components, we see no cogs, antennae, gears, rivets, heatsinks, lights, hard drive hubs, vents, starbirds, hidden Mickeys, Aurebesh letters, or exposed wiring:

According to a member of the SWLH facebook community, this style of datapad appears throughout the more recent animated Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons, and while its overall design is detailed, its rear face is likewise quite plain:

As I’ve written before, if you want to make a datapad that matches the GFFA style, the key thing to keep in mind is that a pocket computer is not a starship hull. Less is more. I thought the three examples at the start—which take an appropriately restrained approach—come closest to matching the ‘look’ of the onscreen ‘visual canon’.
I think it’s very encouraging that people headed to Galaxy’s Edge clearly have the desire to interact in a more immersive way with the Star Wars setting by crafting kitbashed ‘datapads’…some of them are legitimate works of art! However, if your desire is to do right and seamlessly blend into the SW setting, a slapdash, meta-referential, or super-personalized datapad will stick out. I truly hope this post will prove useful to any would-be Batuu bounders—or GFFA reenactors/living historians—who want to kitbash their own datapad and keep it as accurate to the in-universe aesthetic as possible!

Have you seen any #datapads that would really fit in the GFFA? I would love to show off some more well-made examples. Leave a link in the comments or come share at the SWLH facebook community, and we’ll see you next year!

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