Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation of the fashions, values, and emotional landscape of the early 1960s, a transitional period between the dull, ordered Eisenhower years and the cultural chaos that would soon follow. Part of the fun of watching Mad Men is knowing that we’re watching the tail end of an era—and knowing that few of the characters have any idea what’s about to happen. The show occasionally hints at the deepening cracks in the American order of things, and I’m convinced this will be a bigger and bigger aspect of Mad Men in the episodes and seasons to come.

The show’s fixation on the seemingly superficial details of a bygone era could have overwhelmed a series with second-rate writing or a weak cast. In the hands of less talented people, it might have been nothing more than That Show With the Amazing Production Design. Instead, everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica. The main giveaways are the “R”s and the “G”s:

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight. (You’ll also notice that the single and double quotes in the screenshot above are straight, not curly—another indication that the design staff is not involved. And jeez, I just noticed that the “r” in “Dr. Oliver” is inadvertently non-italic.)

Of course this raises a conceptual issue: Do a show’s closing credits take place outside the world of the show? If so—and it ain’t hard to make that argument—then who cares if the credits are set in a shitty font? Well, then, why are opening credits usually so carefully art directed? They usually don’t exist within the world of the show either. It’s partly because an effective opening credits sequence helps set a tone and a style. So why not sustain the tone and the style all the way to the end of the closing credits?

No one would argue that Mad Men’s producers should spend as much time or money on the closing credits as they did on the opening credits. And it’s not like they necessarily had to choose a font that existed by 1962. (The font in the opening credits looks like Trade Gothic Condensed or a similar classic gothic, but it may well be a modern cut.) My point is, it wouldn’t be hard to choose Helvetica or Futura or even EF Windsor Light Condensed from the drop-down font list in whatever program is used to create the closing credits.

This is obviously a small detail. But Mad Men is a show that matches small details as well as any series that’s ever been on the air. Why does such a pitch-perfect show end with such a jarring anachronism?

Related articles: “The Scourge of Arial” and “How to Spot Arial.”

Check out this astonishing TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the development of an amazing visual technology called Photosynth. As Arcas’s bio on the TED site explains:

Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

This is a revolution.

[via NewsDesigner.com.]

Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.

One of the weirder style sheet idiosyncrasies I’ve noticed in recent years is Slate’s use of superscript for ordinal suffixes—e.g., the “st” in “21st.”

That’s not the most gripping sentence to start a post with, but bear with me. As in Chinatown, where a few innocuous clues eventually lead to the discovery of a vast criminal conspiracy, this style sheet tic is the key that unlocks a sinister plot—and it has nothing to do with George W. Bush’s failure to fulfill his National Guard duties in the 1970s. Let’s start with this passage from a restaurant piece today by Inigo Thomas:

The conventional view is that a visitor to New York should get to know as many places as possible in the city, especially its restaurants, no matter how short their stay. … [But] you tend to see and hear more of New York if you go to one place again and again. Pick one saloon: Take, for example, the Café Loup on West 13^th, between 6^th and 7^th. Here, you’re as likely to find interesting strangers who will tell you something of their New York as you are anywhere else. It’s an old Village hangout, once located further east, in the days when William Burroughs was a habitué.

I know of no respectable publication, print or online, that shares this style sheet tic. About the only place you can get away with using superscript ordinal suffixes these days is in signage and other graphic contexts. They would be bad enough in a print publication, but on the web they’re even worse: The conventions of page rendering mean that the superscripts force entire lines of text down and away from the lines above them, wreaking havoc on line spacing. It looks terrible, and there’s absolutely no justification for it. For footnote references, there’s probably no way around the problem, so it’s justified in those situations. But not for ordinal suffixes, which are never superscripted by any knowledgeable copy editor. What was Slate’s copy department thinking when it made this choice?

But all becomes clear when you consider Slate’s long association with Microsoft, the company that launched Slate and owned it for almost a decade before selling it to The Washington Post Company a few months ago. Microsoft has exasperated literate people for years with various seemingly arbitrary defaults built into Word, the most popular word processor on the planet. One of those seemingly arbitrary defaults is the superscripting of ordinal suffixes. A decision made long ago by some illiterate flunky at Microsoft has led much of the English-speaking world to believe that the superscripting of ordinal suffixes is not just okay, but standard.

Was Slate forced to follow some company-wide style sheet? Is there a shadowy Martin Stett figure deep within Microsoft who works to impose the company’s sinister copyediting rules on the rest of the world? Will Slate’s ordinal suffixes drop to the baseline now that they’re no longer propped up by the diabolical Bill Gates?