I started watching the critically-acclaimed series Mad Men on DVD over the summer, and I am enjoying it a lot. I was a little kid in the early 1960s. Watching it is like stepping back in time. People really did used to smoke and drink like that. Of course, the show is set in the early 1960s, so I had to write a “Typecasting” piece about it.

Considering that the show is about an advertising agency, there isn’t as much type on Mad Men as I would expect. When there is, it’s usually used they way it would have been in the early Sixties, except it seems the type choices are limited to whatever happens to be loaded onto the computer.

The show starts out with stylish opening titles featuring glimpses of real ads from the period—and a clinker: What’s Lucida Handwriting (1992) doing here? I usually consider the titles to be outside the world of the story, but considering all the period cues in these titles, this typeface, which was designed specifically for computer screens, is out of place.

Then there is the Gill Sans (c. 1930) problem. Gill is used quite a lot in the series, mainly for Sterling Cooper Advertising’s logo and signage. Technically, this is not anachronistic. And the way the type is used—metal dimensional letters, generously spaced—looks right. The problem is that Gill was a British typeface not widely available or popular in the U.S. until the 1970s. It’s a decade ahead of its time in American type fashions.

This is not to say that they never get it right. Here we see signage similar to what they have at the agency, but in this case using a more plausible Futura-like style.

This grocery store interior is also quite good. Some casual brush style lettering and Futura again, not feeling out of place at all.

This beer label caught my eye: Was there really a Fielding beer brand that had labels exactly like Hamm’s beer, but with green instead of blue? (By the way, the beer cans in the show are opened with can openers. No pop-tops here. Nice detail.)

Then there are the ad layouts, supposedly produced by the art department at Sterling Cooper. You can tell the layouts are done with markers and pencils, as they would be, although they seem too sketchy. Perhaps this is to help them “read” as marker layouts on TV. The ad designs feel flat-footed and mediocre, but we also know that Sterling Cooper is not in the vanguard of advertising—they scoff at this clever and now-famous Doyle Dane Bernbach Volkwagen ad—so maybe that’s intentional. On the other hand, they are way ahead of their time when it comes to type, using faces that didn’t even exist yet.

These lipstick ads feature Fenice (1980) with Balmoral (1978) for the script caps. Amazone (1958) for the script lowercase is fine here, but the outline looks too much like a modern computer graphics effect (which is what it is).

Here is some hand-drawn ITC Kabel (1975) and, I’m pretty sure, Bookman Old Style (1989), one of Monotype’s ITC stand-ins.

Whoops—Zapfino (1998). I guess they use Macs.

Gill Kayo did exist at the time, but wasn’t in style yet and feels out of place on this church flyer. Gotham (2002) is just wrong. The blown up vintage clip art seems odd here, too. The whole layout has a Kinko’s feel to it.

There is also this curious American Airlines ad featuring Helvetica several years before Massimo Vignelli famously redid their corporate identity using… Helvetica.

The church bulletins are a bit problematic, partly because they are typeset (the ones I remember were mimeographed). Palatino (1950) existed, but didn’t really catch on in popularity in the U.S. until around 1970. And Snell Roundhand (1966) is definitely premature. This feels more like desktop publishing than early Sixties ephemera.

Speaking of which, the sets of Mad Men are filled with actual artifacts and ephemera from the early Sixties—magazines, books, packaged goods, furniture, art, record jackets, typewriters. This is great (and it must be a lot of fun to scrounge for props), except that sometimes you can tell this stuff is really old, especially anything made of paper. I can almost smell the mildew when Betty Draper is reading her yellowing copy of Family Circle.

The ad writers listening to a then-new Bob Newhart comedy album was a nice touch, except that it looks like they got their copy at a Goodwill store.

Alert fans have noted that Seventies-era IBM Selectric II typewriters are used on the show, but even these have visible signs of age, such as the yellowed plastic shield you can see in this shot. I wish they would figure out a way to make these props look less aged. I sometimes feel like these characters are living in a retro museum instead of 1960s New York.

I don’t mean to be so hard on Mad Men. I dearly love this show. If it were a two hour movie instead of a season and a half (so far) of one-hour TV shows, this would be a much shorter article. And the fact that the shows are broadcast in HD makes it all too easy to scrutinize the props. But, I have to admit, scrutinizing the props is part of the fun of watching Mad Men.

(Special thanks to reader Michelle U. for reminding me I needed to watch this series and look at the type.)

Update: I forgot to mention the (I hope) thoughtless choice of Arial for the closing credits. Happily, this territory was nicely covered recently by Andrew Hearst.

Ginger is the most recent Filmotype font I’ve digitized. (See also Zanzibar and Glenlake.) It’s the first in a range of Filmotype “G” series fonts—condensed sans serifs whose names all start with “G”—that have many Futura-like features that are unusual for the style. I was interested in this range of typefaces even before I knew about Filmotype. Few of them have ever been digitized before. I plan to do all of them eventually (sooner than later, I hope).

To bring Ginger into the 21st century meant designing dozens of new characters to expand its limited character set. Caps, lowercase, numbers and a few symbols and punctuation marks might have been okay back in the 1950s, but today’s fonts are global citizens and have to play as well in Prague as they do in Peoria. In designing the new characters, I tried to imagine how Ginger’s designer would have designed them. (We know who designed some of the Filmotype fonts, but not Ginger. Over the years many of the records of who did what were lost.)

Like all the new Filmotype revivals (available from Font Bros), Ginger has been remastered to high standards and is a modern font in every way. It is available in OpenType format, which means you can use the same font on either Mac or PC, and includes many OpenType goodies, such as an alternate lowercase “a”, arbitrary fractions, case-sensitive forms, and extensive language support.

Filmotype Ginger is available now from Font Bros.

While I was off doing type things at TypeCon in Buffalo this last July, my partner was off seeing the city. She got a picture of this breathtakingly beautiful old sign. Wow.

Almost forgot to mention: I did an interview with LetterCult, the new website devoted to the art and culture of making letters. It just went up today. Link.

The site’s been up less than a week, but there’s already a ton of great stuff on it about lettering and type design.

Here is an example of what designers used to have to do in the days before desktop publishing:

All this for a few blocks of text. In this case, for a client’s stationery. It’s from about 1986 or so. I was already starting to use PageMaker for some jobs, but high resolution output was not available quite yet in Minneapolis, and 300 dpi LaserWriter output would not do for a job like this.

Note the note at the bottom: “Tuesday A.M. if possible.” It was probably sent out on a Monday (delivered via courier), and would have been considered a “rush” job. The markings in blue and light red were made by the typesetter to themselves. The others are mine. I don’t remember exactly, but it probably cost $75-$100 to have this copy typeset, including delivery charges.

There was never any question that the spacing and quality would be anything but perfect. None of this had to be stated in the “specs” unless something unusual was called for, like the note near the bottom that says “K 1/2 U” meaning “kern one half unit.” The finished “repro” would still need to be cut up and pasted into position on illustration board before it could be printed.

We are so spoiled nowadays. We can set the type ourselves, right at our desks (or laps), and instantly see what it will look like. No more spec’ing, or waiting, or paying big typesetting bills. On the other hand, you do have to know a lot more about setting type than you did back then to get the same level of quality.

(A possibly interesting footnote: The copy was printed out on a dot-matrix printer, an Apple Imagewriter II, using bitmapped fonts I made myself on my Mac, including one that mimics the look of a typewriter.)

My friend David Steinlicht recently posted a time-lapse movie showing the day-to-day progress of his award-winning entry to the seed art competition at the 2008 Minnesota State Fair. It depicts a scene from the video game Grand Theft Auto (of which he is an avid player) with a can of Festal sweet corn. In seeds. Not your typical seed art subject, but David is not your typical seed artist.

The speed at which the work progresses is highly misleading. To put things into perspective, David includes video of the process in real time after the time-lapse part.