Every graphic was in the wrong font, and nobody could tell

Mamba Smith is the founder of Queen City Garage, which produces The Grand National Show: a weekly NASCAR panel show on Grand National Today where broadcasters and drivers argue about the last race and pick the winner of the next one.

Every graphic in the first seven cuts of this week's NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series episode was in the wrong typeface, and it passed review anyway.

The show's font is Barlow Bold with Work Sans for the small type. The graphics shell from last week's episode loaded them through a relative path. This week's episode lives in a different folder, the path did not resolve, and the browser did what browsers do when a font is missing: it fell back quietly to a serif. No error. No warning. Just Times where Barlow should have been, on every board, including the fifth version of the finished show that went out for review.

Nobody caught it by looking, which is the point. A fallback font is not obviously wrong. It is just not right, and "not right" is very hard to see in a thumbnail.

The fix, and the rule

The fix was one line: the builders now write an absolute path to the font file into every render, so it cannot fail to resolve from any folder. The rule that came with it is that any new episode builder must do the same, or it will silently render serif again.

That is the whole incident. It is small. I am writing it up because of what it cost and what it revealed.

What it cost

Each graphics fix on this show costs about 45 minutes, because a change to a template means a full rebuild of every board and a re-render of the master to check them in place. Version six was rejected for cropped heads, mismatched backgrounds and a missing social board. Version seven fixed those and was rejected for an oversized, wrong-colour team mark on one tile. Version eight is the approved master.

Three rounds at 45 minutes each, on top of the font. The lesson written down that night: check every tile at full size before the rebuild, not after. A thumbnail hides a wrong font, a clipped head and a mark in the wrong colour equally well.

What it revealed: the v08 standard

The rejections forced a decision about what a driver board is allowed to be made of, and the answer is now written down.

Official portraits only. This week the team photos were collected from JR Motorsports, Haas, RCR, Hendrick, Joe Gibbs Racing, Viking, Sam Hunt Racing and the NASCAR media site, through a logged-in browser, because several team sites block plain downloads and a small headless harvester had to be built to fetch them. None of it is generated.

Each portrait is cut out per tile. Faces are located with the face detection built into macOS, Apple's Vision framework, and the crop is set from the face, not from the image centre, which is how cropped heads happen. The cut-outs sit on one navy panel so the backgrounds match.

NASCAR number badges are vectorised and rendered as badges, not typed. Car numbers never carry a hash mark in front of them. Team marks are placed at a fixed size and in the team's own colours.

That is the standard every board on both shows is built to now. It came out of a bad week, which is how most standards arrive.

Why a wrong font matters on a racing show

Because the boards are the show's credibility. When Carla Metts says Jesse Love has matured and the board beside her shows Love's official portrait, his number as NASCAR draws it and his team's mark in the right blue, the viewer believes the number underneath. When the board is in Times New Roman with a head cut off at the eyebrows, the viewer is not wrong to wonder what else we got wrong.

What a person did: rejected three cuts, chose the typeface, set the rule for what a board is made of. What the machine did: harvested the official portraits, found every face, cut every tile, and now renders in the right font from any folder.

This is No. 11 in How We Make the Show, the Queen City Garage build log on producing The Grand National Show. We wrote about rendering boards in a browser in No. 04.