Serious question: What's with the upside down S's? It's clearly intentional, but why? Is it a recognized thing in typography?

You are right about S but for the E they most definitely didn't rotate it, they reflected it horizontally(not knowing which horizontal was right) and that's what we have here. Had they rotated it, it'd have been too obvious for them to not notice the mistake but because it's reflected the average joe may not notice the nuances. You have to have some type background to notice the lean or the bottom arm being shorter as a result of flipping it. An installer prolly didn't care to see this because he likely had nothing to do with typography except installing it. If you asked me 8 yrs ago to install this, it's more than likely I'd have fucked up too typographically because I would only be there to install it, not study romans. Now, if the installer was some self proclaimed type nerd whose hate for comic sans defines type nerd, then everything I said changes. Burn them at the stake.

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