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Typecasting: The Use and Misuse of Period Typography in Movies (2001)
- matiasz 9y agoThe 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. PDF: http://mbtype.com/pdf/bird-verdana.pdf http://mbtype.com/pdf/bird-verdana.pdf
- davidgaleano 9y agoDid he ever get a reply?
- ecostache 9y agoYes, Mr. Bird was a bit defensive...here's a summary w/ links to the exchange on Twitter: http://www.candlerblog.com/2012/01/25/brad-bird-responds-to-typographer http://www.candlerblog.com/2012/01/25/brad-bird-responds-to-...
- ClassyJacket 9y agoI 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.
- iainmerrick 9y agoThat's an interesting exchange! 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...
- bitwize 9y agoOne thing I noticed: 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.
- Freak_NL 9y agoThere 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bunch of functional ageing hardware is going to get a lot harder as time goes on for complex electronics that have been superseded by modern technology.
- kgwgk 9y agoThey could simulate it: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- majewsky 9y agoThis is awesome! I looked in my package manager and saw there's also an open-source cathode terminal emulator that also supports Linux: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- vidarh 9y agoSome emulators has built in support for various degrees of simulation of CRTs too.
- PDoyle 9y ago--minor spoilers-- 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?
- imron 9y agoIn a similar vein, in 50 years, they will be making movies set in the 80s and everyone will be walking around with iPhones.
- datenwolf 9y agoWell maybe not iPhones, but flipphones for sure.
- imron 9y ago> Well maybe not iPhones I'm not filled with confidence http://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-65-29-historically-impossible-details-in-famous-movies/ http://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-65-29-historically-impossi...
- petecox 9y agoNo 20 is daft given 'Hispania' was used in Roman times, which ultimately gives us Spaniard, Hispanic, Spain and España.
- kccqzy 9y agoI 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?
- taejavu 9y agoThe 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.
- mattkevan 9y agoLike 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.
- kccqzy 9y ago
- Aloha 9y agoSo I collect telephones. 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).
- jkaptur 9y agoI think that they also had Joan say "the medium is the message" about a decade before McLuhan thought it up, but I could be mistaken.
- tokai 9y agoThe 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.
- js2 9y agoAh, so this article looks at anachronistic use of typography in movies set in the past. In the other direction is: https://typesetinthefuture.com/ https://typesetinthefuture.com/
- Animats 9y agoThe 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. [1] http://www.hplhs.org/resources.php http://www.hplhs.org/resources.php
- Jaruzel 9y agoBeing 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?
- vacri 9y agoIf 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.
- mortenjorck 9y agoSuspension 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.
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- earthbeing 9y agoDude, get a life! I mean, does it really matter? Movies are flawed with much deeper issues that no one will ever care about types. When we correct the story and scientific reasoning behind the sci-fi movies, then we can think about use/misuse of types.
- vidarh 9y agoHe 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.
- earthbeing 9y agoSo you're basically saying that "how many people are attracted to your idea" is a good measure for value of that idea? If only all those people in history thought like that, we'd still be living in caves.
- vidarh 9y agoThat 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] https://www.marksimonson.com/info/about https://www.marksimonson.com/info/about
- raverbashing 9y agoFunny how an article about picking errors had gotten the movie distributor for the first movie wrong (it's Miramax)
- rbanffy 9y agoI abandoned TLC's Halt and Catch Fire when the IBM 3033 started up with a black on white CGA font on a 3278. And, of course, booting into PC-DOS. I made https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font for a reason.
- ch4s3 9y agoSo 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.
- rbanffy 9y agoHyperbole. I already had abandoned it, but gave a shot because of the 3033. But come on... A 370 booting DOS?! After a painstaking physical reconstruction? To be fair, I already noticed their use of MDA fonts for the Zenith machines.
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- j2kun 9y agoSimilarly, I get bothered by movies and television involving the misuse of (usually decorative) mathematics.
- JoeDaDude 9y agoLol, I remember seeing the film "Helvetica" [1] in which one of the commenters remarked how anachronistic fonts would ruin a movie for him. [1] www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817