One of the most enter­tain­ing con­tin­u­ing series about typog­ra­phy on the inter­webs is Mark Simon­son’s Type­cast­ing: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typog­ra­phy in Movies. Orig­i­nally a single overview of typo­graph­i­cal anachro­nisms in movies, it spawned the follow up series Son of Type­cast­ing. What Mark does is research the use of period typog­ra­phy in movies and tele­vi­sion series, check­ing the cre­ation dates and prob­a­ble usage of the fea­tured type­faces against the time frame the story is set in. The goofs he uncov­ers are guar­an­teed to elicit a chuckle if you’re a type enthu­si­ast with an inquis­i­tive and crit­i­cal mind. Con­versely it is very inspir­ing every time he demon­strates how a design team gets every single detail right through care­ful research.

Still from Back To The Future III.

I already made a small con­tri­bu­tion to the series once. When watch­ing the third instal­ment in the Back To The Future movie series with my kids this summer, I noticed some­thing odd. Although it went by pretty fast I rec­og­nized Hel­vetica (1957) and Euros­tile (1962) carved on a tomb­stone in the year 1885.

Still from Dexter, Season 1, Episode 11. Head­line set in Frutiger, an unlikely choice.

And now it hap­pened again. I’ve writ­ten a couple of arti­cles on Show­time’s Dexter tele­vi­sion series recently, telling how good both the spoof mag­a­zine covers mar­ket­ing cam­paign and the Emmy Award win­ning open­ing cred­its are. Yet today I must report a goof I detected in the show. A couple of days ago my wife and I were enjoy­ing “Truth Be Told”, the 11th episode of the first season – argh, the sus­pense! At some point Dexter is search­ing through news­pa­per archives, look­ing for clues as to what exactly hap­pened to his mother, and the con­di­tions in which his step­fa­ther found him. A couple of news­pa­per front pages are briefly seen in this scene, and that’s when I noticed some­thing odd. Some head­lines in the news­pa­pers dating from 1973 were set in arti­fi­cially squooshed Arial. Yet that type­face was only released in 1989/90. When exam­in­ing the screen­shots I was sent by Sunny Gosal I also saw Frutiger and force jus­ti­fied (!) Times Bold Italic being used, both quite improb­a­ble choices. A sim­i­lar thing hap­pened to me when read­ing the oth­er­wise exquis­ite comic book trade paper­back Top 10: The Forty-​Niners. The appari­tion of Arial in news­pa­per head­lines of that time (1949) bru­tally shat­tered my sus­pen­sion of disbelief.

Still from Dexter, Season 1, Episode 11. Head­lines set in Times caps and Times Bold Italic, also an unlikely choice.

Many people will find this triv­ial and actu­ally they may very well be right. On the other hand, how much effort would it take to get it right? I decided to put this to the test. It only took me a little research to uncover News​pa​per​Ar​chive.com (thanks, Flo­rian), an online data­base which allows you to “Easily Find Over 3.03 Bil­lion Names; Over 1.01 Bil­lion Arti­cles; Search 94.4 Mil­lion Pages; 784 Cities; 240 Years; 3,084 Titles”. After brows­ing a random selec­tion of Amer­i­can news­pa­pers from 1973 I was able to deter­mine within min­utes that they mostly used geo­met­ric sans faces like Metro, Futura, Erbar et al, or modern serif faces like Bodoni for exam­ple. So there you go, it’s not that hard after all. And for the design team, it’s not really about briefly shat­ter­ing the illu­sion for a single type geek watch­ing the tele­vi­sion show you worked on. It’s about taking a little more pride in your work. But again, I realise this may seem triv­ial to most people.

Still from Dexter, Season 1, Episode 11. Here it’s not very clear, but I think the head­lines are set in squooshed Arial.

Still from Dexter, Season 1, Episode 11. Again, it’s still not very clear, but I think the head­lines are set in squooshed Arial.

Still from Dexter, Season 1, Episode 11. This on the other hand clearly is squooshed Arial. And the heads in force jus­ti­fied Times caps and Times Bold Italic are highly improbable.

Tags: anachronism, Arial, Dexter, headlines, newspapers, Season 1, Showtime, television series