You are standing in a corridor, and on either side of you is a door. The door to your left is made of old, splintered wood. Yellow light, warm as butter, spills from beneath the door, bringing with it the faintest notes of a song that almost seems familiar, if only you could hear it better.
The door to your right is a deep, dark red. Behind it you hear nothing.
If you choose to open the door to your left, turn to page 85.
If you choose to open the door to your right, turn to page 34.
What is the first image that pops into your head when you read that paragraph? Is it, by any chance, something like this?
Weathered covers hugging pages that have gone a little yellow at the edges. The kind of thing you might find on a shelf when you’re eight years old, the kind of thing you read while you wait for the rain to clear up on a summer’s afternoon. Where it came from no one can say, but what they can say is the decade. It is supremely, undeniably from the 1980s. And it's not just the color scheme or that particular breed of painted cover art that carbon dates these books.
It’s the font.
Type is one of the most important elements of design. It can change the mood of a piece entirely. Put a serif font in the wrong place and suddenly your clean and modern design looks like it was crafted by a librarian in 1986.
Thin, elegant typefaces with low crossbars and graceful curves can evoke images of flappers and Gatsby and all things Art Deco. Blocky, sharp-cornered fonts with a uniform size and shape scream Football and college and tailgate parties. Once you see a font often enough in the same context, your brain learns to expect that context from that font.
Stranger Things, an arguably perfect show (especially season one, which is, essentially, flawless), perfectly executes the art of the typeface.
The show is a love letter to the 80’s, and the sweet little XOXO at the end of that letter is the opening credits.
The credits were created for the show by Michelle Dougherty and the team at Imaginary Forces. They went through several variations before settling on the now iconic Stranger Things logo. A lot of factors went into deciding the look and feel of the final product. The speed at which the letters faded in or were revealed. The extreme zoom on the angles and curves. In this article by Ashley Hoffman (here) from TIME, both Michelle Dougherty and Dan Perri, who designed the title screens for the original Star Wars movies were both quoted concerning the gritty glow in the opening credit sequence.
“So if you look closely, you’ll see what Dougherty calls “happy mistakes” like the color pink bleeding through the lettering. “That was the beauty of film then. A human touch that gave it texture,” she said.
Screen title designer Dan Perri, best known for designing screen titles for 1980s Star Wars movies, had helpful feedback. He thought it looked like something you’d see when a movie went with the cheap optical house, and whoever made the sequence would have been fired for it.”
Perhaps, most importantly for the show and the credits, there was the choice of font: A classic typeface known as ITC Benguit.
ITC Benguiat is a typeface used on everything from the novels of Steven King to Choose Your Own Adventure books. It was created by Ed Benguiat and released in 1977. Decades of seeing that typeface associated with all things horror, mystery, and adventure tells us exactly how to react. Just the sight of those spooky, spooky serifs send us into shivers. More than that, with the evolution of fads and marketing trends, this particular font is now associated with a specific era. A decade of bold colors and big hair. A decade of neon and leg warmers. The decade of 1980.
We see that font, and we know we are in for a thrill.
A...Thriller, if you will.
And therein lies the genius of the logo, of the opening credits. The perfect blend and balance of nostalgia, genre, and visuals. The eerie yet optimistic opening song tells you something mysterious and wonderful is about to take place.
The synth tells you it’ll be taking place in the 80s.
The extreme zoom, the slow reveal of the letters, makes the viewer question what they are seeing before finally revealing the whole, preparing the audience for the mystery of the show.
The grit, the “happy mistakes” and the glow reveal that the mystery is taking place in the 80s.
And finally, the font itself immediately conjures up a sense of unease. We’ve seen it before. On posters and old t-shirts, on VHS boxes in thrift stores and on the cracked and faded cover of a well-read paperback. Horror. Mystery. The kind of thing we weren’t allowed to watch when we were younger, and how that made us want to watch it even more. Classic horror and the era that built it.
The 1980s.
Stranger Things is a masterfully crafted show that manages to utilize the nostalgia of an era as a powerful story-telling tool, while still managing to feel fresh and original. The show pays attention to the details. Sets, props, clothes, language, all of it pulls the viewer into the show, wraps us in the story. The strongest example of this is the opening credits. Just a few bars of synth, the flickering red of the letters pulsing against the black of the screen, the slow reveal of each ITC Benguiat letter, and suddenly we aren’t binge watching something on Netflix.
We’re in Hawkins, Indiana in 1983. And we’ve got a mystery to solve.