Another thing I saw strolling down the streets of San Fran­cisco with my friend Zara Evens was this giant adver­tise­ment on the side of a tourist bus. Zara pointed out the resem­blance with the numer­ous Obama posters I had been seeing, and indeed – it is a design by the same Shep­ard Fairey, better known under his nom de plume Obey Giant.

Shep­ard Fairey does Dexter © Joe Pemberton

Joe Pem­ber­ton com­ments, “Notice the re-​use of Fairey’s own Obama pose there. I’ve been inter­ested to read how this trend is emerg­ing in pro­pa­ganda posters. The upward stare, the aspi­ra­tional 3/4 view, etc.”.

The adver­tise­ment is of course for Dexter, the hit tele­vi­sion series from Show­time my wife and I immensely enjoy watch­ing. As usual Europe is behind on the orig­i­nal broad­cast, which means we’re only two thirds into the first season. There’s just this thing about a blood splat­ter ana­lyst with the police depart­ment who secretly is a like­able serial killer – it’s a bit dis­turb­ing that one can sym­pa­thize with such an immoral lead character.

The inven­tive­ness of the pro­mo­tion is up to par with the over­all qual­ity of the series. The most strik­ing part of the recent cam­paign is a slew of print adver­tise­ments made to look like mock covers of pop­u­lar mag­a­zines. It was cre­ated by Red Group, an inter­nal cre­ative unit at Show­time, and the Ini­tia­tive unit of the Inter­pub­lic Group of Com­pa­nies, the Show­time media agency. Last month the cam­paign was taken up a notch when the covers were extended into mock mag­a­zines with a lim­ited page count. Those were dis­trib­uted in news stands spe­cially erected for that pur­pose; one of them for exam­ple on Union Square in San Fran­cisco (I’m really sorry I missed that).

The spoof mag­a­zine covers are incred­i­bly well crafted and look very con­vinc­ing. Faith­fully recre­at­ing the mag­a­zine logos and find­ing the cor­rect type­faces for the cover titles must have been a dif­fi­cult task, yet most of the covers make you look twice before you real­ize that the logo actu­ally spells out “Dexter” instead of the magazine’s orig­i­nal name. They are a real treat to dis­cover and very funny, espe­cially with the “slasher” ref­er­ences in the titles and some of the cover images. The fact that the choice of cover type some­times is a bit off doesn’t dimin­ish the fun. I wonder if the Typophile Type Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Board was con­sulted for this job.
Read about the Emmy Award-​winning open­ing cred­its of Dexter on Unzipped.

The first four covers below were made avail­able as desk­top images on the Dexter web­site – hence the better qual­ity – while I found the remain­ing ones in a number of gal­leries on the internet.

The Wired cover of course pre­sented a con­sid­er­able prob­lem. While indeed it once used to fea­ture Foundry Grid­nik – the faceted sans seen on the mock cover – last year the redesign intro­duced the custom type­faces Vitesse and Vitesse Sans, a squar­ish slab serif and sans by Hoe­fler & Frere-​Jones. “Custom” of course means not avail­able to the gen­eral public, hence the prob­lem. They got the mag­a­zine logo right, but I’m not sure either Stymie Extra Bold (it’s in Font­Book but I can’t seem to find the exact weight on FontShop.com) or Cholla Sans ever made the cover of Wired. Minor point of crit­i­cism – to remain con­sis­tent with the Wired look Michael C. Hall’s head should have par­tially cov­ered the mag­a­zine logo.

And it looks like the GQ cover is behind the times as well. Although the same Foundry Grid­nik is still used on the British web­site it seems to have been aban­doned in favour of David Berlow’s Titling Gothic (and at least in one instance Sebas­t­ian Lester’s Soho – August’s Victoria’s Secret Models cover). The logo is spot-​on though.

Again a very real­is­tic mag­a­zine logo for the Vanity Fair cover. The orig­i­nal type­face is Ter­mi­nal Design’s custom VF Sans Con­densed, an inter­pre­ta­tion of the clas­sic metal face Vogue. You can approx­i­mate its look with Neu­traface No. 2, or Nobel if you prefer a more “vin­tage” palate. James Mon­tal­bano also cre­ated VF Sans and VF Script for the mag­a­zine, and cover titles are usu­ally set in VF Didot, a slightly con­densed Didot. The mock cover uses light Hel­vetica caps which may not be accu­rate but kind of fits.

The Details cover uses all caps ITC Con­duit and Dig­i­tal Sans for the cover titles. The feel of these tech-​like sans faces is a decent approx­i­ma­tion of Hubert Jocham’s Sep­tem­ber in the orig­i­nal, con­sid­er­ing this once again is a custom type­face not avail­able to the gen­eral public. Sim­i­lar B and R shapes can also be found in Psy/Ops’ Sophisto or Jocham’s own NewJune.

The rest of the spoof covers were found in a number of online galleries.

A mix of Inter­state and Hel­vetica was used for the US Weekly cover. I can under­stand Inter­state can be mis­taken for the mag­a­zine logo and big title, but Hel­vetica looks com­pletely out of place. The orig­i­nal covers fea­ture dif­fer­ent weights and widths of Relay, Cyrus High­smith’s ver­sa­tile inter­pre­ta­tion of C.H. Grif­fith and W.A. Dwig­gins’ Art Deco geo­met­ric sans designs. The only thing that bugs me is the amper­sand that doesn’t match.

Match­ing The New Yorker was easier as the type­face based on its logo was named after the mag­a­zine. Irvin, the orig­i­nal header type for The New Yorker was designed in 1925 by Rea Irvin, first art direc­tor of the mag­a­zine. Keep­ing in tune with the illus­tra­tive covers Edward Sorel – an artist who often draws covers for The New Yorker – was com­mis­sioned to do a por­trait of Michael C. Hall as Dexter.

The New York Times Mag­a­zine cover shouldn’t have been too hard nei­ther. True, the name­plate is custom designed but a good number of Old Eng­lish-style black­let­ter faces come rea­son­ably close to be adapted. And the cover type is spot on – Stymie Extra Bold (which can be found in Font­Book but seems to be miss­ing on FontShop.com).

The last four cover logos must’ve been quite dif­fi­cult to “forge”. Los Ange­les Mag­a­zine’s script is not unlike Ale­jan­dro Paul’s Mousse Script or Milk Script, but obvi­ously had to be recre­ated from scratch. The cover titles on the orig­i­nal covers are set in Gareth Hague’s Anomoly and Zuzana Licko’s Fair­plex. On the mock cover the latter was replaced by Serifa-like Boton by Albert Boton, an under­stand­able sub­sti­tu­tion.
:: U P D A T E ::Typophile Michael Albright revealed that – although it is not fea­tured in his gallery; I checked because I had a hunch – Jim Parkin­son is also the author of Los Ange­les mag­a­zine logo.

Some more Boton on the Esquire cover, this time paired with Stymie Extra Bold Con­densed (this one is in Font­Book as well but not on FontShop.com). It is very faith­ful to the type laden orig­i­nal covers. The typo­graphic back­grounds seem to alter­nate between a sim­i­lar very bold slab serif, Hoe­fler & Frere-​Jones’ Mer­cury Dis­play (see also Chris­t­ian Schwartz’s Farn­ham Dis­play) and hand let­ter­ing. As for the orig­i­nal logo, it is a clas­sic, revived by name­plate­meis­ter Jim Parkin­son. On a side note – this year marks the 75th anniver­sary of Esquire. You can see its covers evolve over the decades in the Esquire Cover Gallery.

Another Jim Parkin­son design is the logo (sim­pli­fied ver­sion) for Rolling Stone. As you can read on the Rolling Stone web­site “Rick Grif­fin, a surfer-illustrator-cartoonist famous for his posters around the San Fran­cisco scene, designed the orig­i­nal. In April 1976, Roger Black, a typog­ra­pher by train­ing, took over as art direc­tor, and our tenth-​anniversary cover, in Decem­ber 1977, marked the end of the hand-​drawn ver­sion and the ini­ti­a­tion of a bolder, smoothed-​out type­face. Five years later, at the behest of Mick Jagger – who told me late one night that “you’ve made it too clean” – we added back some ele­ments from the orig­i­nal to create the iconic logo that graces our cover to this day.”

The entire mock cover is a Parkin­son affair, because the titles are set in his epony­mous Parkin­son family of faces. I have the impres­sion that on recent covers Parkin­son is being ousted by Cochin, unless this is a tem­po­rary thing. But all in all this is again a very suc­cess­ful imitation.

And last but not least there’s the Inter­view cover whose char­ac­ter­is­tic brush logo obvi­ously had to be redone by hand as well. The type seems to change quite a bit, so I guess pick­ing Alter­nate Gothic was fair game, although I’ve not seen FF DIN on any of the orig­i­nal covers. They might as well have stuck with Hel­vetica Black.

To con­clude I must say that this has been a ter­rific and humor­ous cam­paign, and the odd typo­graphic mis­fires shouldn’t detract from the fact that this is top notch work; very suc­cess­ful through­out the whole series of covers. And maybe next time they can ask us in order to get even the most minute typo­graphic details right. ;)