It's amazing how many major brands these days still have work with apostrophes displayed incorrectly. For only pennies a day, a little thing called smart quotes or OPTION + SHIFT + } can make a big difference in a brand's life. It's really annoying and it's something even first-year design students learn to correct. If they can't be bothered, I'd prefer it then to just lose the apostrophe altogether. Sure, it'd be gammatically incorrect, but at least I wouldn't have to look at those damn things anymore.
6 comments:
Speaking as a writer who used to worry about such things - someone who shipped his copy with curly quotes and typographically correct apostrophes in place - I got tired of getting negative feedback from designers and production people.
And I'm just going to say it here: a *lot* of the design talent I've come across the last five years have known precious little about typography, especially how it relates to readability.
Do they still teach it in school?
Tom, there is certainly a difference between bad typography and improper punctuation. But like you said, you are the writer and they are the designers/production. Typography should be the responsibility of the designer, yours should be punctuation. Which means you too should be using an apostrophe and not a footmark.
I do not disagree, however, about the lack of good type skills in recent years. I actually feel there was more emphasis on type as image than on type as language in my own design education.
FYI: there are two types of dashes (em and en) and a hyphen (yeah, that is the one between the = ond 0). None of them should be used with space on either side—just so you know.
Ooooo! Writer's brawl.
Bill: my eyes hurt now. Thanks for nuthin'
I used to happily apply the curly versions. More often than not, I found my Internet copy peppered with "$%%*" garbage characters - right where your typographically correct curly bits were supposed to be.
Was it a Mac/PC thing? Lazy production staff? Sunspots?
Whine about the straight punctuation, it's more readable than garbage characters.
More's the pity, but until everyone (or everybody's software) gets their shit together, I'm a little stuck.
FYI: I'm well aware of em and en dashes. I'm equally aware of their tendency to get munged in translation.
Once that happens, they're often replaced with dashes. How, one might ask, would someone differentiate between a dash and a hyphen... spaces?
If you have any solutions, I'd love to hear 'em.
Interesting feedback from writers on this issue. It just dawned on me that you guys are taking the hit for this, lol. Not meant that way, n fact, it’s designers who are responsible for this.
Here, we're not talking Word docs from writers that end up as Powerpoint decks, (which by the way, usually also contain another peeve of mine, the double space at the end of a sentence, but another time perhaps).
Here, the designer would’ve worked in Photoshop and exported the whole frame as one still as either a png, gif or jpeg to be animated or kept static. The text would not be actually highlightable, unless they made it that way with other programming methods that ran text over the top. (This is typical.)
Point is, it’s the designer who is responsible to highlight and correct the apostrophe before ‘converting’ and exporting it from Photoshop. They are the ones who get copy and place it, check for typos, formatting, etc. (Or whatever program they used. Flash would allow you to highlight the text as long as it was made dynamic. Still, it’s up to the designer to check this stuff as they’re usually last in line to see it before it goes out the door to the client.)
Nothing worse that seeing "it's" get mixed up with "its"! Sorry - writers gotta write, designers gotta design. Sure, taking away punctuation may look pretty, but it also looks dumb.
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