Inaccurate Uses of Fonts in Film
JA
November 26
Remember the times when you would sit around and try and spot the continuation errors or gaffes in various movies? Well how about doing the equivalent for when it comes to fonts?
Mark Simonson has written several blog posts on the use and abuse of typography in cinema, and these are definitely worth a look for anyone who can tell their Book Antiqua apart from their Palatino.
Common mistakes can be found in newspaper or magazine titles in period or early 20th century movies. For example, two headlines in LA Confidential, dated 1953, are printed in Helvetica Black and Univers, which weren’t designed until 1959 and 1957 respectively. What’s more, Simonson writes that they weren’t commonly used in the US until the 60s at any rate.
Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York features straight apostrophes on various signs, which would be fine save for the fact that ‘straight apostrophes and quote marks did not exist in typefaces until the advent of digital type in the 1980s. It’s a computer thing, not a typographic thing’.
Even Matthew Weiner’s fantastic TV series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, is not immune. Despite the wonderful wardrobes of Joan Holloway and Betty Draper, the show is somewhat slack when it comes to type. As pointed out in this article from the New York Times, the opening credits show an ad in Lucinda Handwriting, a font which was only introduced in 1992.
My favourite gaffe however, has to be from James Cameron’s supposed epic Titanic. Simonson notes that ‘the ship’s pressure gauges use Helvetica’. However, this typeface was not designed until 1957, that’s forty-five years after the Titanic sank.
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Comments
26 Nov 09 at 21:06
And the Mad Men end credits are in (horror of horrors) Arial.
http://www.panopticist.com/2008/08/mad_mens_arial_problem.php
...28 Nov 09 at 2:09
I remember when Lucida Handwriting was the shiz. So 1990s.
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