Better Call Saul is an American television drama series that premiered on AMC on February 8, 2015. The series premiere was the biggest in cable history, drawing 6.9 million viewers.

The character of Saul Goodman is a two-bit lawyer whose boisterous ads are typical of the injury law firms that appear on American billboards and local television: garish and tacky. The typefaces for the TV series logo, then, were well chosen. Two low-rent scripts are slapped into place: “BETTER CALL” is the kind of script brushed onto a wall by a signpainter in a hurry, and “Saul” is the kind of script found on drugstore greeting cards. The brushy scales of justice could be clip art from the hard disk of a budget designer, or from the shady pits of 99designs. It all fits Saul’s style perfectly.

The opening title sequence overlays the logo on a different scene in each episode. The low-fi, dirty video effect is a reference to the pilot episode in which McGill (AKA Goodman) watches old VHS tapes of his ads. The logo is followed by the creators’ credit set in a classic bitmap font familiar to any of us who had an early ’90s camcorder with a timestamp/label function.

Main opening title from Episode 1.

Main opening title from Episode 4.

Main opening title from Episode 3.

In Better Call Saul, Season 1, Episode 4, Saul Goodman (then Jimmy McGill) posts a billboard that mimicks his rival attorney Harry Hamlin in every way, including photo style, logo, and even Hamlin’s trademarked “Hamlindigo Blue” color.

The JMM monogram appears to be ITC Franklin Gothic Extra Compressed. The rest of the logotype style is also swiped from Hamlin Hamlin & McGill, but it doesn’t seem like the big time law firm put as much effort into it as they did Hamlin’s suit and haircut. The type comes from the Latin portion of one of the many MN Indic fonts bundled on the Mac. Perhaps the designer was just cycling through his font menu at the last minute and settled on “Bangla MN”.