Although “The Big Bang Theory” ended its 12-season run in 2019, some of the background details on the show still help unravel the larger mystery of the character’s lives. In this case, there’s a poster in Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter’s (Johnny Galecki) kitchen that shows an anthropomorphic robotic beer keg holding a glass of beer and chuckling. It turns out that this is an advertisement for Petro Devos Audenaerde, a currently defunct Belgian beer company which brewed their wares in a village called Oudenaarde. 

The poster’s author still hasn’t been discovered all these years later; “X. A.” or “X. Ch.” are the only hints given as to who may have created it back in the day. But it turns out it’s contributed something uniquely geeky to the computer world: the poster inspired the creation of the AUDEN type font, which can be downloaded and used by consumers everywhere to this day. It’s a contribution to the technical arts that Sheldon would be proud of. Also proud: the show’s set designers, who had a lot of fun putting together the sitcom’s look.

“The Big Bang Theory” had a set design team that worked hard to get the right look and feeling in place for the show’s smart young singletons. Set decorator Ann Shea explained to Entertainment Weekly that keeping each character in mind when putting a set together was vital to the show’s mood. “Comic-book store owners in [L.A.] know me well!” Shea said at the time, explaining that she dressed Raj’s (Kunal Nayyar) rooms in a classier style after reading scripts in which he was described as coming from money. She also bought silk sheets for the then-single Howard (Simon Helberg). 

It was dressing up Penny’s (Kaley Cuoco) pad that definitely seems to have let Shea go wild. “Penny’s a fun, vibrant, young girl … so I used bright, bold colors to decorate,” she explained. But her watchword for the younger woman was to keep it quite messy. Ultimately, audiences clearly came to love what she did, from the robot poster on down. The creative details unlocked fans’ inner nerds, even if some of those set dressing choices left them scratching their heads.