What is an apostrophe? What is a quote mark? Are they curved, or can they be straight? It’s hardly a question on everyone’s lips, but it’s certainly raised the ire of people on this site, Apostrophe Atrophy (via Daring Fireball). With the link text on DF, I was fully expecting the usual suspects of grocers’ apostrophes - potato’s, orange’s, apple’s and the like - and instead finding a set of “straight” apostrophes and quotes in place of curved ones.

Call them what you will, “straight”, “dumb”, “ambidextrous” or whatever*, the apostrophes and quotes shown on the site appear (from the ones I saw) to be otherwise grammatically correct, which is reassuring. The point of the site however, is to say that it is entirely incorrect to use a straight quote or apostrophe instead of curved ones. Is it though? A comment by Michael Beiruit garnered this response:

Michael Beirut linked to us on Design Observer. He says that if people understood the difference between its and it’s he wouldn’t care what kind of quotes they use. Our opinion is that if you are setting type you should know about the correct kind of apostrophe and ALSO [sic] know about proper grammar. We have never shown html [sic]** text before, but when the site is for designers, you would think they would take the time to use the correct apostrophes and quotes…

All very true, and yet we have this, on MetaFilter. I’ve reproduced some comments here in case the page goes away:

I always turn off “smart quotes” in Word. I think it looks pretentious.

I agree! Up with the “dumb quotes” backlash!

I agree with the smart quotes issue. But the apostrophe thing… sometimes a dumb apostrophe looks better.

Smart quotes are the fastest and easiest way to make your web page look like garbage on half the computers that visit, particularly since most designers use cute PHP tools that replace the dumb quote with the Unicode or Windows-font smart quote characters rather than with an HTML entity.

So there are people who would rather use straight quotes, for aesthetic, ease-of-use, technical and even social reasons, and their reasons do have some validity. But why do we have straight quotes at all? If they’re incorrect, where did they come from? Well, perhaps rather obviously, it’s a compromise created by the lack of space on original typewriter keyboards (more specifically, lack of space inside the typewriter for the extra workings for more keys). There wasn’t room to have an extra dedicated key for left or right quote/apostrophe marks, so a single key was used for a new “ambidextrous” set of quotes and apostrophes. As typewriters were a way of getting words hammered onto a page; faster than a scribe, easier to read than most people’s handwriting and always consistent, no matter who was doing the typing, this compromise was acceptable. If you wanted to publish your words, you would send it to a printer where typesetters would take your words and use their typographic skills to make them readable and (hopefully) beautiful.

With the advent of word processors that do everything except what you wanted to do, people are used to picking a font, typing their stuff and printing it out. The operative word here is typing. The keyboard still only devotes one key to the two symbols, and they are used for mathematical primes, feet, inches, minutes, seconds and arc as well as quotes and apostrophes. It’s up to the program you use to work out the context and hopefully replace it with the correct typographic entity. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is desirable:

For the better part of the twentieth century, the distinctive forms of typewriter type (notably its single-character width and unstressed stroke) characterized the immediacy of thought: getting the idea down without dressing it up. Now that computers have replaced typewriters, most word processing programs default to Helvetica or Times Roman (or their derivatives) as the typographic expression of simple typing. [...] As a typographer, you should recognise the difference between typing and typesetting. Time and usage may ultimately make Inkjet Sans the expected typeface for letters. For now, however, on paper, typewriter type is still the best expression of the intimate, informal voice - direct address. Imitating the formalities of typesetting in a letter is always inappropriate because it suggests an undeserved permanence - the end of a discussion, not its continuation. John Kane, “A Type Primer”, p85

So why the problem? Why do some people prefer straight quotes? Perhaps it has something to do with how the symbols are perceived. If you type something and the program you’re using changes it, then your first reaction may well be one of resentment, “How dare this program claim to know better than me!?” If what it changed it to is better, for example, a spelling correction, then you will accept it and move on. However, if it made what appears to be a superficial change, a stylistic correction, then it is more likely your resentment will remain, and you’ll go looking for that know-it-all option in the program preferences and self-righteously turn it off. I’ve done stuff like that before, and I doubt I’m unique with it! Curved quotes are perceived as ‘proper’, the kind of thing that people who publish things for money would do, people who care about such details. To use them in your work might make people think that you are one of these people, and we end up with the first quote above: curved quotes are pretentious. Think how this consideration would influence companies when they create their advertising, their billboards, their brochures and leaflets.

There are also a few technical reasons for preferring straight quotes - the main one being that they exist in “low ASCII” and no special codes or character encodings need to be used to show them. This is important consideration when programming, but is just a convenience for the lazy when creating (say) web pages. I keep my browser encoding in UTF-8, and frequently come across pages where the encoding is different from mine and the page hasn’t been put together properly with this possibility in mind. I’m left looking at a page with loads of question marks and “unrecognised character” marks everywhere. There’s no excuse for getting it wrong accidentally. Most word processors will automatically replace the straight quotes with curved ones, and for online editing, most CMS tools will automatically insert the correct HTML entities so that the symbols appear consistently on all browsers, and will usually handle (say) Word’s smart* quotes perfectly well too.

In the end, I would say that of course it is always preferable to use type correctly, but typography is the servant of meaning, not the master. If straight quotes, however much of a modern bastardisation of type they may seem, enhance the meaning of a piece (or if curved quotes would distract the reader), then you must use them. Otherwise, don’t.

From Pride and Prejudice, on the low-ASCII and straight-quoted Gutenberg Project.

* I absolutely refuse to use the terms “smart quotes” or “dumb quotes”.

** Capitalising ‘also’ but not ‘HTML’ is unfortunate, for a site so apparently devoted to correct typographic usage.

Browsing Drawn! the other day, I followed a link to Craig Ward’s site, showing some of his fantastic typographic illustrations. I’ve posted a couple of crops of two of my favourite images (so you can see the all-important detail) - visit his site for the full images. Beware the we-don’t-need-no-scrollbars site design. Leave your mouse over the word ‘DOWN’ and you’ll be able to see some more of his work… eventually. Are scrollbars so bad? Still, the site does look lovely.

I always liked the display screens in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I was reminded of them the other day by something. I went online to have a look round for a picture of some of them, and, well, there’s really not very much. Even the IMDB pages have very low resolution blurry shots that barely show the HAL console, never mind the details of what the info screens are showing. I’ve got the DVD, so a bit of stepping through frames later I can at least recreate the basic appearance of them. The small text is unreadable for the most part, but I could make a guess (that’s part of the fun). I created a desktop (iPhone/mobile) out of them too.

The big question of these things, though, is, “What are they showing?” Given that so much of the rest of the film is pretty carefully thought out, it seems a bit odd that these screens should end up as a slightly more sophisticated version of Star Trek’s blinking lights. There are some graphs, some video feeds, and a few lines of numbers, but these three-letter codes are the most eye-catching. If they’re supposed to be some representation of HAL, what are all the buttons on the console for? Actually, I do wonder why the buttons are there - since everything is done by voice, and when HAL goes wrong, there’s no frantic hitting of buttons or any hint that these consoles do anything at all.

Still, it is all rather pretty!

Update: Steve Siers has pointed me to this fascinating site, with actual paintings of some of the screens. It’s definitely worth a look round the site at the rest of the work on there too. Also, he sent me this link, which kept me happily engrossed for quite a while - there is a HAL 9000 simulator and a screensaver in there.

I traced this lovely ligature from the photo, representing the “ff” digraph from the 28-letter Welsh Alphabet.

During a discussion of modern architecture in Wales (as you do), David pointed me in the direction of some pictures of the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, which has some fantastic lettering on the front canopy. The letters, big, chunky and pretty dramatic and spell out the title of a work for chorus and orchestra commissioned from Gwyneth Lewis for the opening ceremony of the building. I particularly like the way the two languages have been written together - the Welsh one being flush-left, the English flush-right, with the ragged edges slotting together nicely - and that they aren’t a direct translation of each other. The lettering itself is lovely, with varied letterforms and spacing giving the whole thing the sense of something hand-done, which given its scale is something to behold. In Lewis’ own words:

The windows out of which the words are made suggest to me an ideal of poetry: that it should be clear enough to let light in and out of a building, offering enough a distinctively local view of the world; it should speak a truth which is transparent, beautifully crafted but also fragile and, therefore, doubly precious.

I think it looks great as it is, but I’ll be interested to see what it looks like after a good layer of verdigris has formed on the copper.

The appearance of the building reminded me of a big regeneration project for Morecambe’s seafront, which also has a strong typographic element. Well, several in fact. It’s the Tern Project, a series of sculptures, walkways, and general improvements to the seafront to make it a more fitting location to see Morecambe’s (arguably) finest asset - its view of the bay. The Tern Project website gives you some idea of what’s been done, but I think whoever built it based it on a museum or art gallery’s site - i.e. make the pictures as small and uninformative as possible - probably labouring under some delusion that seeing a nice big photo will somehow deter you from visiting. Note to developers of these sites: it doesn’t! Put big pictures on your site! Let people get an idea of it, and they’ll be more likely to visit! A photo can only give a rough impression, but seeing the context and some detail, you will hopefully want to visit. The top two of these pictures are mine, the bottom one is from this we-think-all-caps-is-cool site. Still, irritating websites aside, I would strongly suggest paying a visit to Morecambe to have a look at the artworks, and to see the view across the bay to the Lake District.

The nonist is continuing with his series of Graphis annuals and has posted a set of scans from the 1957/58 edition. Go and take a look! If you’re in the UK, you might notice something rather familiar, something that reminds you of an advert much more recent than the late 50s. Now, I’m wary of assigning nefarious motives to people about this kind of thing, but it’s quite interesting to compare and contrast the two:

I’m fascinated by imaginary products created for films and games - there’s an art to creating something just similar enough to real products to be recognisable as a brand type, but without actually copying any particular identity. Some films and games come very close to existing brands (RUF in Children of Men; GAP for pets, Tube in GTA 3; Subway) while others work within the conventions of a product type so you know what kind of thing it’s supposed to be (pretty much everything in the Truman Show). I have an article I’m writing on brand conventions, but that’s not for today. The reason for this post is some of the work featured in this interview with Sarah Bradley, graphic designer and typographer at Pixar, and ex-lead title designer at Disney. In the article is a matrix for a box of rat poison shown in Ratatouille, which I just had to make into a fake box shot - I do this a lot at work and it’s fun to do, so I couldn’t resist.

The original matrix:

I just found a link to this odd thing on NOTCOT. It’s essentially a synthesiser control panel for changing the forms of glyphs in a typeface, but instead of just changing sound, it treats the strokes as a kind of ‘play-head’ for creating sound, rather like a groove in a vinyl record. As you change the glyph, you change the sound, and vice versa. Also, what you do to one glyph will be done to all the others.

Now, my first impressions after looking at the results are to say that this is an evil device born of the unspeakable nether regions of mythological demons - I mean, to do this to type? They’ll be kicking puppies next! However, I’ve since watched the video and I think there may be some interesting things in there, say, altering the stress on type, adding some interesting brush strokes and the like, but that what you get would be a starting point for any kind of type project. I wouldn’t ever use any of the results as they are. Besides, the noises the thing makes are stunningly annoying. It’s no wonder most of the results are so hideously ugly, you’d end up with a seriously bad headache and a foul temper after a few minutes of using it.

There is one good thing about it though: the display interface. It reminds me of graphics from Star Wars, or the info-screens in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any moment you expect a Ti-Fighter to come in and start blasting vertices from the bastardised remains of the glyphs:

It’s not every day you come across something that you’ve not only never heard of before, but never even suspected existed. Such it was with me and Mongolian Calligraphy until yesterday evening. I found some examples of it in a Google image search from here and here and decided I needed to learn more about it.

It turns out that thanks to Stalin and the Soviet Union we nearly ended up losing the classic Mongolian script as a living writing system entirely:

Introduced in the times of Chinggis Khaan, some eight centuries ago, it was widely used until 1942, when Stalin decided that Asian nations including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia must all use Cyrillic instead of their native script. Mongolia Today

Thankfully, now that the Soviet Union is dead and gone there are now efforts to revive interest and skills in ‘Old Script’. There are a couple of other writing systems used for Mongolian, but I’m mostly interested in the classic script, and especially the calligraphy it makes possible. It really is beautiful. Interestingly, it’s read from left to right, as Wikipedia explains (from the classic script article):

Most other vertical writing systems are written right to left, but the medieval Uyghur alphabet and its descendants - the Mongolian, the Oirat Clear, the Manchu, and the Buryat alphabets - proceed from left to right. This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anti-clockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.

I noticed the left-to-right reading direction after a bit of research led me to The Mongolian Bible site, which has the New Testament translated into Mongolian and presented in classic script. You need Internet Explorer to see it, as it uses Microsoft-specific things to display the font and the vertical type, but if you have IE it’s worth a look.

Made me look twice, thrice… does that say, “kerning?” or “keming?”. A neologism from David Friedman:

Just a little, hey-look-at-this post. I love these illustrated (or would that be illuminated?) fruit by Sarah King. See them (and a banana) on the Evening Tweed site.