Straight Quote Marks Drive Me “Crazy”
That has to be the one typographical blunder that bugs me most. It reeks of Pagemaker and desktop publishing. Yet, you see the “dumb marks” everywhere: Headlines, cable news graphics, websites, and more. They are the marks of the amateur.
Certainly, the straight quotes are only one of many typo-no-nos: widows, orphans, false italics, etc. For more great/bad examples, see Crimes Against Typography.
Prompted by this article in the NY Times, I wonder, what typographic faux pas irritates you most?
Image courtesy of Flickr
8 Responses
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I’d have to say that apostrophe s used for plurals. Like CD’s, DVD’s, M&M’s, and even worse, plural’s.
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AV says:
Is it considered OK in Europe or something? Is it really that hard to program? Or improve upon?
Compositors, please! It’s the belt/suspenders of typography. You look bad wearing both a space between paragraphs and an indent. But you have to have either one or the other on, lest you want us to see an undifferentiated text column that’s, frankly, hard to read, let alone enjoy.
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This is the blunder that catches my eye most. I recently bought a shower curtain rod that used curly quotes for inches—a reverse of this common error. This and the unnecessary quotes are “fun to catch.”
What does an incorrectly used ligature look like?
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11111 says:
erewrew
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Good question. This quote thing has been an error plaguing the editorial and design world for quite some time. Even many of my past designs have the old footmarks that I am going to have to go back and change.
The one for me recently is the word “Web site”. Commonly known as “website,” the word has been defined in the widely used Chicago Manuel of Style to be formatted as two separate words, with the “W” capitalized. It looks so wrong, and many clients have even tried to correct me on it, but what is the standard, is the standard. Every detail counts!
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I hear you with the straight quotation marks! But worse still (and admittedly not a typographical faux pas) are the unnecessary quotation marks. For lots of examples of such stupidity check out http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/.