The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society does an excellent job of providing late 19th-early 20th century fonts and prop documents for role-playing games.[1] I use some of those for steampunk projects.
I'll often catch stuff like this when watching period-set movies or TV shows.
Mad Men deserves credit though - in six years they made one mistake - they had a set with a modular plug in it at Don's house (and it wasn't even a modular plug, it was an insert that could be replaced with a modular one on a G-Type handset).
The phrase was desiminated my McLean in his 1964 publication "understanding media". As I understand Mad Men takes place during the 60s, so there is no mistake there.
People are starting to forget what old computer screens looked like. It could be because there's a shortage of actual, functional CRT monitors. But these days when an old computer is called for you are likely to see perfectly smooth, green text in Consolas or similar composited onto a prop screen, rather than actual glowing pixels. It's jarring and saddening, and it's happened in two films that I've seen so far: John Wick Chapter 2 (wherein VIC-20s stood in for the old computer keyboards) and Kong: Skull Island.
But John Wick Chapter 2 is not a period piece. The VIC-20 is not meant to be a modern computer there. As I recall, they have women dressed as 1940s switchboard operators with prominent tattoos using VIC-20 keyboards connected to modern monitors to take orders for assassination of assassins -- tell me again which part of this seems out of place?
They were deliberately using old technology, presumably to avoid being traced by the police. I don't ask that realistic VIC-20 displays be used, I only ask that if they're going to employ this conceit, the displays be plausibly "old" and not have nice graphics.
There may be several practical reasons for doing that though. CRT screens create weird effects on camera, and maintaining a bunch of functional ageing hardware is going to get a lot harder as time goes on for complex electronics that have been superseded by modern technology.
Being devil's advocate here for a moment... Surely ensuring that the text shown on screen is easily readable for the audience (especially so for exposition props such as newspapers), outweighs the need to be temporally correct with the typeface?
If you want to get that level of pedantic with films as the article does, then few will survive. 'Suspension of disbelief' is a thing for a reason; a movie maker is after immersion, not strict accuracy. It only needs to be historically accurate if they're claiming to be some sort of documentary.
Suspension of disbelief is always a continuum. A drama set in a hospital might have some very reasonable efforts at realism, enough to seem believable to an informed layperson, while a particular procedural oversight might completely ruin the immersion for a medical doctor in the audience.
As a designer, I might see Futura used in a sign in a period piece set two decades before Paul Renner designed the font, but not really care because the grotesks and early geometrics that preceded Futura bear a lot of similarities. But if I see Futura in a period piece set two centuries before the font was in use, that completely destroys the believability of the film's production design.
The typographer Matthew Butterick was so bothered by the use of Verdana in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” that he wrote a letter to Brad Bird, the film’s director.
I wouldn't call it defensive. Not overly defensive anyway. Seems like an appropriate response. The guy was needlessly pedantic. His issue wasn't that it was hard to read, just purely that he didn't personally like the font. His best argument is seriously that it's the Ikea font? Really?
I can understand it more when it's a tool or something you use frequently like the font on a phone, but it's literally a few minutes out of one movie.
Good points on both sides, but surely the correct decision by Bird would have been to delegate the font choice, to the head visual designer or some such.
Or maybe he already delegated, asked someone to make a shortlist of 5 fonts for him to choose from, and for some reason Verdana was the best on the list...
I really admire the author for being able to identify so many types with just a few letterforms. I've had a passing interest in types so I can identify basic Microsoft/Apple free fonts as well as a few common Adobe ones like Minion Pro and Myriad Pro. I think I can identify perhaps at most thirty different typefaces. Anyone wants to chime in on how you are able to be familiar with so many more?
For much of my working career, I worked off and on as a graphic artist. In the 70s for an advertising agency and a typesetter. In the 80s and early 90s, for a flexographic printing plate manufacturer. There, about 80% of my job was to replicate already printed material (primarily food packaging) exactly which, of course, meant identifying type. We had a fairly impressive library of type catalogs - everything from hot type specimen books from the 30s and 40s through the latest catalogs of transfer type. I can't even begin to imagine how many hours I spent over those years trying to identify an obscure face. And if we couldn't find it, or it was no longer available, we would have to replicate it by hand, either using photostats from the catalog and assembling them into what we needed, or just plain drawing the letterforms. (Sometimes we'd "fudge" and use a face as nearly identical as possible, and hope the customer didn't complain. I suspect we were more obsessive about it than most of them were, since I don't recall a customer ever complaining that the type didn't match...)
mattkevan's comments are a good primer for quickly identifying one font over another, and are pretty much what we would have done for the "first cut" to disqualify similar faces.
It isn't a job I'd relish today. Back then, in essentially the pre-computer days, you were dealing with thousands of fonts. Today, the choices seem almost infinite.
Like with most things it's just a matter of practice and knowing what to look out for. Same as with birds or leaves or whatever.
Firstly, is it serif, sans-serif, handwritten, monospaced etc? This will narrow it down, but distinguishing between similar fonts, such as Arial/Helvetica, Avenir/Futura, Garamond/Caslon etc. requires looking at individual characters.
Lots of characters don't change much between typefaces and can be hard to identify at small sizes, but others can change a lot so they're the ones to look out for - including the lowercase g, uppercase Q and ampersand &.
Is the g double storey or single storey? Open Sans and Noto are identical except for the g (Open Sans is double storey).
What's the tail on the Q like? Does it cross the circle, is it curved or straight? Open Sans and Droid Sans are identical except that the tail of the Q is curved in Droid Sans and straight in Open Sans. (Also the uppercase I has bars in Droid Sans).
Arial and Helvetica can be told apart by looking at the lowercase t. Arial's t terminal is at and angle whereas Helvetica's is horizontal. Also the terminals of the uppercase S are at an angle whereas Helvetica's is horizontal.
Yes Arial and Helvetica are a special case that I learned to tell apart early on since both are very common. I just use Arial and Helvetica to set the same letters, but in both different colors and set the transparency to 30% or thereabouts. Then I position the letters such that their difference is quite easy to tell.
Thanks for the answer. I guess I just need more practice.
The author is a professional type designer and created some well known fonts - including Proxima Nova and Anonymous Pro. For someone that has spent much of his life looking at and thinking about typefaces, I imagine it's trivial for him to accurately identify hundreds of varieties.
I recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst if you'd like to improve your type identification abilities. The appendices have a good, but by no means exhaustive, reference of some of the better known typefaces.
I believe he just has an experience. Some people can identify fonts, others programming languages. Even if you aren't a pro, just search for "guess font from image."
So a time period error in one scene put you off of the whole show? I mean, there are a number of errors in any kind of period show, there's just too much to keep track of on a tv budget.
It's a pretty good show, and worth watching. I'd recommend skipping that episode if it bothers you and giving it a try.
He wrote an article 16 years ago about a subject related to his career, and it is still drawing attention to his site and his work 16 years later. Seems like a good investment to write that article to me.
That depends what the idea is. If the idea is an idea for an article for a blog that exists to showcase your business or interests, then yes, absolutely, in that case how many people are attracted to the article and learn about what you do and your skills should be a major measure of success.
> If only all those people in history thought like that, we'd still be living in caves.
If "all those people" through history had measured the impact of what they did and done more of what worked and less of what didn't, instead of writing things off as useless based on belief, we'd be far further ahead.
In this case, what he did worked - his site specifically exists to showcase his professional skills and his work [1], and here we are discussing an article he invested time in writing 16 years ago
[1] http://www.hplhs.org/resources.php