Design educator and writer Ellen Lupton has a clever slide show about dumb quotes: the vertical hash marks or primes that are often incorrectly used as commas on signs, websites, and even in print. AIGA Cincinnati has a video of her giving the presentation. Just click on the “revolution” link in the upper right of their home page.
“Curly quotes” are the right way to make quotation marks and apostrophes in all contexts. Primes are only correct for inches and feet. The problem is that the shift / quote method gives old-fashioned “typewriter-style” vertical quotes, not true typographic quotes that lean, or curl to enclose the quotation.
Many computer applications do this automatically, but it’s important for designers to know how to put in curly quotes when the computer application doesn’t do it for you. Open quotes are made with a hidden keystroke combination: option / open bracket. Closed quotes are option / shift / open bracket. Option / shift / closed bracket will give you a curly apostrophe.
Bloggers and web people often accept hash marks, and some insist they are correct. I say if the New York Times doesn’t allow it, why should their website? There’s a simple solution: I use hash marks when I type, then run the text through this great HTML punctuation checker. It replaces the punctuation marks with unicode, which is converted by browsers into lovely, correct curly quotes.
By: Anon on April 30, 2008 
