Our own Mark Simonson wrote the definitive treatment of typography on Mad Men. (I have a couple of pictures.) It turns out that series creator Matthew Weiner knows we’re watching.

(Someday, when Typophile learns about the blockquote element, quotations like the following will be more semantically and visually distinct.)

You know this whole concept about anachronisms… I know it’s a game people like to play. And they know I’m working my ass off to keep it from happening. Someone sent me something about how the font at the end of the show was Ari[a]l and was not period. I was like, “The show’s over. Go home. I’m allowed to do whatever I want.” [...]

But if you’re person who loves fonts, fantastic. I’m sure there are some mistakes in there about when these fonts came out.... I can tell you that almost everything you see in that show, especially the artwork, is cut and pasted out of old ads. Those fonts may not have existed on a computer or couldn’t be typeset yet, but they were cut and pasted from old ads, so maybe they were hand-drawn or something.

The American Airlines ad that they were most critical of had this very famous lettering and it was used by DDB about six months after the crash, and we put it in our pitch and I was thinking “I’m sorry, I don’t have the freedom to do that with my fictitious ad agency? To have them get there before DDB did?” Maybe American Airlines saw it and told DDB they wanted it. Who knows?

I love that people are invested enough that they’re fighting about it getting into it and doing that. I put so much ambiguity into the show if you say something about it that I didn’t think of I don’t say “You’re wrong.” I’m just saying that’s not what I meant or whatever. But I’m fascinated that people get so much out of it.