dot-font: Back to Typographic Basics

23

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.

John D. Berry is a typographer, book designer, design writer, editor, and typographic consultant. He is a former President of ATypI, and he is the founder and director of the Scripta Typographic Institute.
  • anonymous says:

    Great article. However, I noticed a heavy usage of double hyphens in this story. Shouldn’t you have actually used em dashes instead?

    Tony A.
    [email protected]

  • anonymous says:

    At creativepro,com we standardized on the double-hyphen to avoid many of the problems we’ve encountered with wonky special characters showing up. Pages with em-dashes that appeared fine on my Mac would display strange substitutions when viewed on my PC, so we settled for a rather inelegant compromise.

    Nonetheless, thanks for noticing.
    Pamela Pfiffner, editor in chief

  • anonymous says:

    To help this article do more than preach to the choir, I think a few visuals of the issues you mention would be helpful.

  • anonymous says:

    What about all those “–” (dash-dashes)? Shouldn’t they be
    an “n” dash, or even an “m” dash?!! Doesn’t type on the web
    give you at least this option?

  • anonymous says:

    The only thing worse than an incorrectly formatted apostrophe is one that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Those of us setting type need to familiarize ourselves with the proper usage of apostrophes for plurals, contractions, and possessives, and make sure we’re doing our part to promote proper usage.

  • anonymous says:

    Typography is something that is often overlooked and almost never taught in a college’s design programs these days…this is the biggest problem I see when reviewing portfolios. I myself have had to pick up things as i go along…can anyone recommend a good, solid book on typography?

  • anonymous says:

    …now he notices these errors too!

    We use freelancers often at my office. When I receive a resume with an inch or foot mark instead of quotations or an apostrophe, I put it in the “circular file”– the trash. Graphic designers now do the job of typesetters, and their work should reflect that!

  • anonymous says:

    I would like to know more about contemporary typesetting and its finer details. What’s a reliable source for the finer details of typesetting for both English and French typesetting in particular, and any other rules that might change when setting in Italian, German and Spanish?? Is there a complete bible of typesetting as it should be done today? Maybe this remedial training (as in a course of reading) could make the subject of another article.

  • anonymous says:

    It’s been a hassle finding character references that reliably handle em dashes, open and close quotes, etc. on my web pages. I’ve found the decimal character references on “https://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/special.html” did the trick reliably on all the browsers I’ve checked so far and they also don’t get singled out as “non-SGML” by the W3C Validator.

  • anonymous says:

    I understand the need for the double-dash in place of a true em dash because of incomptable browsers. But I believe the rule for an em dash is no spaces–just the em dash between the words.

    There is an excellent article written by Peter K. Sheerin reviewing the rules for special characters and how to implement them on web pages at https://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/

    Keep up the good fight.
    MW

  • anonymous says:

    As a staff designer at a medium-sized print shop, I can testify that a lot of what you see out in the world — a lot — is not the work of designers, but of customers themselves. Much of what goes through our shop is actually customers’ files (MS Publisher…grrr) cleaned up as best we can: brochures, newsletters, signs, the gamut.

    Some of our clients don’t mind being corrected, but a distressing number actually notice and get offended when you correct their punctuation. I’m talking about hyphens or double hyphens for em dashes (“the dashes are too long,” I’ve heard), double spaces after periods, five spaces for indents, apostrophes in plural words that aren’t possesive and on and on.

    The sad fact is the people who pay the bills don’t care. It’s ulcer-inducing for sure.

    For those looking for a book, try Robin Williams’ “The Non-Designer’s Type Book.” Fun to read and browse.

  • anonymous says:

    It’s getting bad … even in print. You expect some lattitude on the web, I guess, but even Newspapers and print ads misuse the apostrophe.

    On a different note, I really enjoy how you have set up text pages so the ads and other blurbs disappear when using the scroll bar, and reappear when moving the cursor back to the body of the page. It makes for much easier reading of text-heavy pages.
    I wish you’d discuss THAT technique soon!

    Thanks for all you do,
    Steve Bohne

  • anonymous says:

    Robin Williams’ first book, “The Mac is not a Typewriter,” addressed the issue long ago, but the problem won’t go away. Once clients trusted to typographers, but now they seem to think they know more about copy editing and typesetting (and design) then the professionals they employ. Is it because the machine sits on their own desktop?

  • anonymous says:

    Thanks for a much-needed sermon! There’s an excellent book on the subject of using type correctly, published by North Light Books. It’s called Type Rules!, by Ilene Strizver. Available at howdesign.com.

  • anonymous says:

    This is probably a cheap shot, John, but just look at your own web page. Double hypens instead of em-dashes, single and double typewriter quotes galore. If somebody does not begin doing it right, everyone will continue to do it wrong.

    Karl-Peter Gottschalk
    <https://radio.weblogs.com/0100271/&gt;

  • anonymous says:

    I absolutely cringed when the latest Campbell Soup commercials aired with the famous tag line “M’ M’ Good!” with straight quotes! This from national ad agencies and running for months.
    Yikes. I’ve seen them in car commercials too.
    35 years of typesetting and I’m still learning. One other problem I constantly encounter is the comma or period outside the quote mark, whether single or double.
    And how about the inconsistent paragraph indents combined with spaces between paragraphs or at the beginning of the text.
    Scot Gaznier

  • anonymous says:

    I think two of the best books on typography are “Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works” by Erik Spiekermann and E.M. Ginger and “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst. The former is a more basic introduction, but has entries that I still find useful; the latter is a much more in-depth and exhaustive guide, wonderfully written.

  • anonymous says:

    Have railed against the prime mark used instead of Good Old Curly for some time (but now we see ads for monitors with inch marks that are really double quotes!!!!!)

  • anonymous says:

    The typorgaphy articles by John D Berry are very informative however they should display proper typography. For instance, the use of double hyph’s (–) in an elliptical thought should be replaced with an em dash (-). Also, it appears in each article that the hypenation is turned off making a very “hard” rag which retards readability and retention. However, I applaud the use of single spaces between sentence stops instead of “french spacing” (2 spaces) which has proliferated since the introduction of the PC some 20 yrs ago.

  • anonymous says:

    The comma call is on the money, but why the quotation marks? Seeing there’s no dialog present, nor discernable, attributable monolog, nor a cite from a previous, recorded utterance, the quote marks are superfluous; unless the billboard is anthropomorphic.

  • woswald says:

    It’s time someone said all of this. Wish attention to it could be more widespread.

  • anonymous says:

    I totally agree that the errors are being made everyday – though I believe that most of the errors don’t come from people with Graphic Design training, but from office administrators and their helpers that are acting as typographers and designers. We are combatting a loosing battle to the desktop publishing world. They use MS Word and Publisher – not bad programs – but just not made to do the extiensive job that needs to be done for printing. I have lost many jobs for companies having their employees do the work on company time (or many times on their own time because they don’t have time during the day to get it done) – then come back and say “can you fix it?”

  • Anonymous says:

    I understand the need for the double-dash in place of a true em dash because of incomptable browsers. But I believe the rule for an em dash is no spaces–just the em dash between the words.

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