Earlier this month, the fantastic Mark Simonson put together a lengthy post about the typography present on screen in the AMC show Mad Men. He mostly limits his exposé to showing which fonts are or are not of the period. But he also points out that real props used from the period in the show all have an anachronistic patina to them, as if the Selectrics available in the 60s were already 40 years old!

While this might seem nit-picky, no one can doubt the fantastic job the Mad Men production designers are doing on the show. We can thank Mark, though, for keeping period typography honest.

Mad Men, Mad Props

While we’re on the subject of title cards… I’ve been doing research on a forthcoming project, and I came across Dave Mackey’s Warner Bros. Cartoons Filmography and Title Card Gallery. The Wayback Machine says he’s been working on it for a while, and I’m glad I found it. It’s really an invaluable resource.

I was lucky enough to contribute some title cards to the brilliant BoingBoingTV series SPAMasterpiece Theater. The caricature of John Hodgman is adequate to the task, but I maintain that portraiture is not my strong suit.

Xeni Jardin and the kind folks at BBtv allowed me to contribute some title cards to their fantastic parody, SPAMasterpiece Theater.

I’ll post some more about this later in the week, including what I’m sure will be an overly pedantic analysis of the style and design choices. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?

UPDATE: Ugh, I now see that my WP template isn’t wide enough (at 430) for BBtv’s embeded video (480). I’ve scaled it down to 430 in the embed, but there are some resolution scaling problems with that. Hit FULL SCREEN for the good on the goods. I guess my template needs some fine tuning… and coarse tuning.

John Hodgman in BBtv’s SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol III: THE STOMATOLOGIST