When most people spot a typo on a sign, they may smirk or make a snide comment. But ulti­mately, most chalk up the mess to human error and walk away.

Not Jeff Deck, a 29-year-old typo-connoisseur from Somerville, Massachusetts. For the past couple of years Deck and his faithful typo-fighting friends (called the Typo Eradication Advancement League or TEAL) have ventured to write or, uhh, right the wrongs of bad signage. Last year Deck and a revolving cast of TEAL members traveled the country in his ’97 Nissan Sentra with the ambitious goal of eradicating the misuse of apostrophes, misspellings and other typo-atrocities.

THE MISSION’S ROOTS
The idea for the typo crusade came after Deck’s fifth-year Dartmouth reunion. Deck described reconnecting with class­mates and discovering their worldly contributions. “I wanted to do my part,” he said. “But what could I do?”

Days later Deck was strolling through his neighborhood when he spotted a misspelled sign. It read: NO TRESSPASSING. The mistake irked him. “They spelled it with two Ss, as though it were a lock of hair,” he recounted.

That extra S ignited a plan. In the months following Deck founded TEAL, saved up $10,000 and plotted his course. He set out in March 2008 on a clockwise route starting and ending with Boston.

Armed with what he dubbed his “Typo-Correction Kit”—really a makeup bag filled with Wite-Out, Sharpies, chalk, crayons and other tools—Deck and the League meandered through mostly urban areas and corrected as many typos as possible.

During their two-and-a-half-month mission, they discovered more than 400 errors and corrected over half. The League was met mostly with apathy, some appreciation and occasional annoyance. Each day’s experiences were documented on www.jeffdeck.com/teal.

All went smoothly until they reached the Grand Canyon. Unbeknownst to them, Deck and friend Benjamin Herson were about to make their own whopping mistake. The duo spotted a series of errors on a hand-painted sign just outside the Desert View Watchtower. Ignorant of the sign’s signifi­cance, they copy edited the text adding a missing comma and fixing an apostrophe. Turns out the 60-plus-year-old sign was a registered National Historic Landmark created by Mary Colter, known as the “Architect of the Southwest.”

Deck and Herson were brought up on charges and plead guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government prop­erty. They have now served a year’s probation, paid a $3,035 fine and steered clear from all National Parks for a year.  
Deck and Herson are currently working on a book about their travels, tentatively called The Great Typo Hunt. The book is due out in fall 2010 by Harmony Books, a division of Random House.

HEROES OR VILLAINS?
The news reports surrounding the case sparked a firestorm, especially online. Many scorched Deck and his partner-in-crime for defacing the historic sign and for having the arrogance to take on such an outlandish task. Yet others heralded TEAL for their noble intentions.


I must confess I was drawn to this story for reasons you might not imagine. Being a designer you might expect me to lambaste Deck for defacing work. Although I’m not a vandalism advocate, that’s not what stuck with me.

I was taken by Deck’s utopian dream—to rid the world of typos. As a writer and designer, I’ve spotted my share of typos and typographic bastardization. Yet, I’ve never once pointed out a mistake unless it was my project. I let the mistakes persist for fear of insulting the sign keeper or of appearing rude and elitist.

Deck’s story got me thinking. I wondered whether we self-proclaimed communicators might take a cue from the typo vigilantes. Maybe TEAL might motivate us toward our own typographic heroism and typo abolishment.

A few years ago Ellen Lupton, typography aficionado, design educator and writer, lectured a packed auditorium at the AIGA Conference in Boston. In her talk she clicked through photos showing a series of type crimes found on NYC storefronts—the majority of which featured the use of hatch instead of quotation marks. With each image the audience roared with laughter as though she were Jerry Seinfeld, pointing out life’s obvious absurdities.

Although we chuckled heartily at the faux pas, the truth is, to the average person dumb quotes don’t look stupid, never mind funny. These kind of typographic nuances are an in-joke among designers, one we’re paid to know. Knowing the difference between a hatch and a quotation mark, detecting widows, orphans, rivers, bad rags, that’s the value designers bring to the table. Similarly, correctly spelling trespassing is our calling as communicators. The question implied by TEAL’s story is where does our job end? 

“TEAL are heroes, without doubt,” said Paul Felton, designer at London design firm Purpose and author of The Ten Commandments of Typography. “If only more people adopted the same tactics to tackle type crime, the world would be a grammatically better place. [They’re the] Batman and Robin of the type world if you will!…The written word is arguably one of man’s greatest creations, so if it is not worth policing then I don’t know what is!”

“It’s a curse,” Lupton said. “You see mistakes everywhere. That’s our calling. That’s our burden.”

But taking a Sharpie to street signs isn’t the way Lupton would prefer to correct the problems of bad typography and communication. She’d rather continue educating the public through her writing and teaching. In a perfect world basic typography would be part of school curriculums, Lupton said. “It really just takes an awareness of the problem.”

Ilene Strizver, founder of The Type Studio, educator known for her Gourmet Typography workshops and author of Type Rules! The designer’s guide to professional typography, seconded the notion. “I’m like a type evangelist. To me, education is the only answer.”