dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
There’s a billboard along the freeway in San Francisco that’s entirely typographic, and very simple. Against a bright blue background, white letters spell out a single short line, set in quotation marks: “Are you lookin’ at me?” The style of the letters is traditional, with serifs; it looks like a line of dialogue, which is exactly what it’s supposed to look like. Since this is a billboard, and the text is the entire message of the billboard, it’s a witty comment on the fact that you are looking at “me,” that is, the message on the billboard, as you drive past.
But as my partner and I drove past and spotted this billboard for the first time, we both simultaneously voiced the same response: “No, I’m looking at your apostrophe!”
The quotation marks around the sentence are real quotation marks, which blend in with the style of the lettering—”typographers’ quotes,” as they’re sometimes called—but the apostrophe at the end of “lookin'” is, disconcertingly, a single “typewriter quote,” a straight up-and-down line with a rounded top and a teardrop tail at the bottom.
To anyone with any sensitivity to the shapes of letters, whether they know the terms of typesetting or not, this straight apostrophe is like a fart in a symphony—boorish, crude, out of place, and distracting. The normal quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence just serve to make the loud “blat!” of the apostrophe stand out. If that had been the purpose of the billboard, it would be very effective. But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become the scene of an exercise in typographic irony, it’s just a big ol’ mistake. Really big, and right out there in plain sight.
The Devil is in the Details
This may be a particularly large-scale example, but it’s not unusual. Too much of the signage and printed matter that we read—that we as designers or typographers create—is riddled with mistakes like this. It seems that an amazing number of the people responsible for creating graphic matter are incapable of noticing when they get the type wrong.
This should not be so. These fine points ought to be covered in every basic class in typography, and basic typography ought to be part of the education of every graphic designer. But clearly this isn’t the case—or else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simply forgotten what they had once learned about type. Or they naively believe that the software they use will do the job for them.
I suspect that one culprit for this loosening of typographic morals is the very medium in which you’re reading this rant—the World Wide Web. In the early days, HTML didn’t support special characters such as typographers’ quotes, and the failure to strip them out of a document before posting on the Web meant weird font substitutions appearing on screen, especially as a Web page moved across platforms and between browsers. Even the page-markup language used on this Web site replaces “sexed” quotation marks and apostrophes with their plain counterparts. As a result, young designers who grew up with the Web and its straight quotation marks don’t know any better while older designers—who should know better—have simply given up or, worse, forgotten.
Maybe it’s time for a nationwide—no, worldwide—program of remedial courses in using type.
Automated Errors
As my own small gesture toward improvement, I’ll point out a couple of the more obvious problems—in the hope that maybe they’ll become slightly less commonplace, at least for a while.
Typewriter quotes and straight apostrophes are actually on the wane, thanks to word-processing programs and page-layout programs that offer the option of automatically changing them to typographers’ quotes on the fly. (I’m not sure what has made the phenomenon I spotted on that billboard so common, but I’ve noticed a lot of examples recently of text where the double quotation marks are correct but the apostrophes are straight.)
But those same automatic typesetting routines have created another almost universal mistake: where an apostrophe at the beginning of a word appears backwards, as a single open quotation mark. You see this in abbreviated dates (’99, ’01) and in colloquial spellings like ’em for them. The software program can turn straight quotes into typographers’ quotes automatically, making any quotation mark at the start of a word into an open quote, and any quotation mark at the end of a word into a close quote, but it has no way of telling that the apostrophe at the beginning of ’em isn’t supposed to be a single open quote—so it changes it into one.
The only way to catch this is to make the correction by hand. Every time.
Anemic Type
The other rude noise in the symphony hall that has become common is fake small caps. Small caps are wonderful things, very useful and sometimes elegant; fake small caps are a distraction and an abomination.
Fake caps are what you get when you use a program’s “small caps” command. The software just shrinks the full-size capital letters down by a predetermined percentage—which gives you a bunch of small, spindly-looking caps all huddled together in the middle of the text. If the design calls for caps-and-small-caps—that is, small caps for most of the word but a full cap for the first letter—then it’s even worse, since the full-size caps draw attention to themselves because they look so much heavier than the smaller caps next to them. (If you’re using caps and small caps to spell out an acronym, maybe this makes sense; in that case, you might want the initial caps to stand out. Otherwise, it’s silly. And—here comes that word again—distracting.)
If it weren’t for a single exception, I’d advise everyone to just forget about the “small caps” command—forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. (The exception is Adobe InDesign, which is smart enough to find the real small caps in an OpenType font that includes them, and use them when the “small caps” command is invoked. Unfortunately, InDesign isn’t smart enough, or independent enough, to say “No, thanks” when you invoke “small caps” in a font that doesn’t actually have any. It just goes ahead and makes those familiar old fake small caps.) You don’t really need small caps at all, in most typesetting situations; small caps are a typographic refinement, not a crutch.
If you’re going to use them, then use real small caps: properly designed letters with the form of caps but usually a little wider, only as tall as the x-height or a little taller, and with stroke weights that match the weight of the lowercase and the full caps of the same typeface. Make sure you’re using a typeface that has true small caps, if you want small caps. And letterspace them a little, set them slightly loose, the same way you would (or at least should) with a word in all-caps; it makes the word much more readable.
Pay Attention, Now
There are plenty of other bits of remedial typesetting that we ought to study, but those will do for now. The obvious corollary to all this is that to produce well-typeset words, whether it’s a single phrase on a billboard or several pages of text, you have to pay attention. Proofread. Proofread again. Don’t trust the defaults of any program you use. Look at good typesetting and figure out how it was done, and then do it yourself. Don’t be sloppy. Aim for the best.
Words to live by, I suppose. And certainly words to set type by.
This article was last modified on March 11, 2022
This article was first published on January 18, 2002
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