Can you see what’s wrong with the statement above?

Bad typography is everywhere. It can be found in magazine articles, outdoor signage, restaurant menus, billboards, newspaper and TV advertisements and all over the internet. Spend just 30 seconds looking it’s easy to find a whole host of typographic faux pas—incorrect hyphenation, ‘dumb’ quotes, double-spacing, widows, orphans, poor kerning… the list goes on. Typography is something every designer should deeply care about, which is why it pains me to see it abused so profusely.

Typographic literacy seems to be on the decline, and as many designers who are not well-versed in typography move into teaching, they pass on little typographic knowledge to their students. A lot of typographic knowledge can be gained in the workplace, but with the demise of the dedicated design agency proofreader, there is less chance of catching typographic errors before a project goes live or to print.

The average non-designer reading a newspaper or browsing online probably doesn’t care about typography and has no awareness of when something is wrong. For example, not many will be able to tell you the difference between dumb quotes, foot and inch marks, or quotation marks. Almost all standard installed system fonts use tabular figures so they don’t think about—and really have no method of—kerning numerals set within text.

Technology is a major barrier in the way of good typography. There aren’t enough keys on a computer keyboard to have separate keys for hyphen, em dash and en dash, or for separate open and closed, single and double quotation mark keys. Designers have to rely on keyboard shortcuts to find the characters they need, and some don’t even have keyboard shortcuts at all—in that case a character viewer such as PopChar on the Mac is needed, or several minutes of trawling through Alt character tables on Windows.

Some software developers have implemented a Smart Quotes feature in their applications that automatically substitutes dumb quotes for quotation marks. This is a step in the right direction, but really it only just masks the problem.

Online typography is a whole other issue as there is currently not a lot of typographic control available. That is changing, albeit slowly, as updates to HTML and CSS are rolled out. It wasn’t until HTML 4 that many of the appropriate characters became available for use, but it takes a lot longer to type ’ for a right single quote than simply ", so you can already see the route the majority will take. Kerning web fonts is still a no-go and for the time being it seems unlikely to stay that way. It’s unlikely there will ever be as much typographic control on screen as is in traditional media.

So, could you tell what was wrong with the type in the first image? It uses a horizontally-scaled typeface, ‘dumb’ quotes, double hyphen and forced bold auto-styling. Below is the way the opening statement should have been written, with appropriate typeface, ‘curly’ quotes and en dash:

Just as the boom in SMS messaging signaled a rise in bad grammar and punctuation, so too is technology at least partly responsible for the decline in typographic literacy. As a designer I feel responsible for raising awareness of these issues and educating people on the way things should be done. Here are some examples of common typographic errors and how to correct them.