Because I encounter so many basic mistakes in everyday typesetting, I thought I could start a little series on how everyone can improve one’s typography in everyday life. While I think that every professional graphic designer (or the like) should memorize these rules in his/her sleep, I’m always quite surprised at how often these mistakes are being made in all sorts of publications, be it books, magazines, websites, flyers etc.
Let’s start this series with the quotation marks.
While there are different punctuation marks for quotation across different languages (more on that later), the most common one we use has become the English quotation marks, also called “speech marks” or “double quotes”. As you may have noticed, I’m talking about not just one, but two marks here. The bad way to do it, is to use the convenient quotation mark button on your keyboard.
This false mark actually comes from the old days of typewriters, where there was not enough space to accomodate for every single punctuation mark. A sacrifice, so to say.
A million, if not a billion people use this mark every day, and why should we blame them? The key is right there in front of us, so why go through the hassle of doing it properly. While I think this is acceptable in everyday communication between common people, I really think that anyone who considers him- or herself a professional graphic designer should set text right.
These bad boys look just like inverted commas (and non-inverted, respectively), and you can easily memorize the sequence of opening and closing, that the sixes always come before the nines.
Some software, like common text editors, provide handy functions called something similar to “smart quotes”. If your interface does not provide this, there’s other ways. People on Macintosh computers can easily accomplish this by pressing ⌥ Opt + [ for the opening double quotes and ⌥ Opt + ⇧ Shift + [ for the closing double quotes on an English keyboard. I myself am using a German keyboard, so for anyone in that position, use ⌥ Opt + 2 and ⌥ Opt + ⇧ Shift + 2.
People on Windows can punch in Alt+0147 and Alt+0148 on their number pad to achieve the same effect.
Wikipedia has a really great and extensive article on quotation marks.
And while I was mentioning my foreign keyboard: the aforementioned rules don’t apply to every language. In German, we ought to use something like this:
(Watch out! Nines appear before the sixes!)
And in Italian and French (and many many other languages) they use something called the Guillemets, also commonly called “angle quotes” or in German “Gänsefüßchen” (goose feet).
In the above example, I used outward pointing Guillemets with a following and preceding space, as it is the rule in French. But there is also inward pointing and spaceless usage of these marks in other languages. Please refer to the Wikipedia article (link above) for all the different rules that apply.
