1

As it seems this is quite symp­to­matic for “gaso­line peo­ple”. I’v taken this pic­ture last sum­mer in Aus­tria. See the num­ber 8

Karmen
January 18th, 2010 at 17:16 pm

2

I think the bot­tom 3s used to be 8s, and since they used up all their 3s for the other prices they got cre­ative for the pre­mium price.

Marc
January 18th, 2010 at 17:18 pm

4

[…] This post was men­tioned on Twit­ter by Keith Erring­ton, Type is Beau­ti­ful. Type is Beau­ti­ful said: Erik Spiek­er­mann 抱怨美国加州的油价牌对待字牌的粗暴，问题在哪里？ http://spiekermann.com/en/treble/ 研究字要火眼金睛。想到去年圣学子的一篇： http://bit.ly/lyBHY […]

Tweets that mention SpiekerBlog » Blog Archive » Treble-trouble -- Topsy.com
January 19th, 2010 at 00:47 am

5

While we read­ers and writ­ers of typog­ra­phy blogs imme­di­ately rec­og­nized the error, there is unlikely to be any error in read­ing the sign. Every­body can eas­ily see the pre­mium gas is $3.339 per gal­lon. Despite the fre­quency of ver­ti­cally flipped 3s and 8s, I have yet to see a gross error such as a fig­ure flipped horizontally.

The 3s on the bot­tom are clearly flipped ver­ti­cally and are not mod­i­fied 8s. To my eye, the 3s ori­ented cor­rectly look like they are sym­met­ric; how­ever, if you were to flip them ver­ti­cally (e.g. in Pho­to­shop; I did) they’d obvi­ously be upside down, and they’d look exactly like the 3s on the bot­tom. So a casual observer might think at first glance that the 3s actu­ally are symmetric.

Many peo­ple prob­a­bly think the fig­ure 3 really is sym­met­ric about a hor­i­zon­tal axis. Such fig­ures prob­a­bly are, at least the way we learn them in Amer­i­can schools. (I’m from Cal­i­for­nia too.)

At nor­mal read­ing dis­tances, such as the van­tage point of the pho­to­graph, the asym­me­try is appar­ent. From the view­point of some­one han­dling the actual fig­ures, an unnat­u­rally close read­ing dis­tance, it might not be apparent.

There might also be a mechan­i­cal expla­na­tion. The upper two prices could have been installed while the per­son was stand­ing up. The bot­tom­most price could have required the installer to bend over, which might have affected the motion he used in pulling let­ters out of the box (or what­ever they were stored in) result­ing in the fig­ures being installed incorrectly.

But even if the gas sta­tion owner real­ized the error, or it was pointed out to him, he prob­a­bly doesn’t care. After all, this is of con­cern only to type geeks, and gas prices are going to change again next week anyway.

Stuart Marks
January 19th, 2010 at 02:37 am

7

The real odd thing about those fig­ures is that they are not 3’s, as they would be fac­ing the other way around (i assume the back side of each plate is pure white so they can be rotated but not flipped). They are obvi­ously not hacked 8’s either. There­fore the per­son might actu­ally know some­thing we don’t about the mag­i­cal num­ber of 333..

Daniel
January 27th, 2010 at 23:20 pm

8

When a num­ber appears as many times as its value you are sup­posed to be set them upside down.

333
4444
55555
666666

and so on, sur­prised you didn’t know that erik.

Youssef Sarhan
February 6th, 2010 at 18:59 pm

10

Always amaz­ing what hap­pens when there is a con­ver­sa­tion about some­thing that most peo­ple never notice. Makes me won­der what I am miss­ing in other domains. And thanks Erik for pub­lish­ing this shot, I thought of you when I took it…

Bill
March 11th, 2010 at 04:04 am

11

Look what we have here..

http://twitpic.com/1a96f6

Spot­ted this on the way to col­lege today.

Youssef Sarhan
March 22nd, 2010 at 16:23 pm

12

“I won­der how many will notice if I turn these num­bers upside down…”

Reynir Heiðberg Stefánsson
April 13th, 2010 at 13:23 pm