Star Trek's graphic designers were under orders to make the Enterprise NX-01's control panels less sophisticated than the instrumentation on Kirk's and Picard's ships. But the show's producers also wanted the panels on Archer's ships to look cool, be believable, and also be affordable. The solution was these panels, which used laminated color prints for the control surfaces, highlighted with a multitude of little rubber simulated buttons, each printed with a number that presumably meant something important to a trained Starfleet technician.