Though attentive to every other detail of the period, Mad Men dares use the "shitty" font Arial to spit out its closing credits. Arial was created in the late 1980s so its creator, Monotype, wouldn't have to pay licensing fees for Helvetica, the 1957 font deemed much superior to its lesser knock off, and created in time for Mad Men's 1960s time period. 'The main giveaways are the “R”s and the “G”s.' Asks the overly concerned Panopticist: "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?"