As announced earlier this week, FontShop’s Wedding Month starts next month! Just over a week away, you can prepare by getting acquainted with our Great Pairs pinboard. Every Wednesday, our type expert David Sudweeks pairs two typefaces available on FontShop; you can easily view and find all past pairs on Pinterest!

Comma

The comma is a punctuation mark that indicates a short pause. It hangs off the baseline, spiraling outward from its interior in a clockwise fashion. You already know this.

Apostrophe

An apostrophe is a floated comma that usually hangs somewhere in the air between the ascender and x-height lines. Its precise purpose is that of a stand-in character for parts left out in a contraction or otherwise abbreviated word (it is becomes it’s, international becomes int’l, 1975 becomes ’75), and also in possessives (Shays’s Rebellion or Black’s Law). Ah yes, and some confused people commonly use apostrophes in pluralizing acronyms. In typefaces, apostrophes are commonly drawn with some optical variation from the comma.

Single Quotes, Double Quotes, Open & Close

Quotes, in brief: Quotation marks are for quoting, repeating an utterance exactly as it was said. Use double quotes for this, and single quotes for quotations within quotations. Quote marks point in opposite directions to indicate an opening and closing of the quote. A single open quote is a single close quote more or less rotated in place by 180°. A single close quote is visually indistinguishable from an apostrophe. Now, all that’s true when typesetting English, but depending on the language, quotes may be placed in different positions or face in directions different than those in the familiar usage illustrated above. They may also not be shaped like the quotes above, like for example, «these».

Oh! Also – mirrored open quotes, or grocer’s quotes, are generally seen as endearing relics by English-speaking audiences, though they do have their own unicode addresses, and are the default in some fonts, including some non-display fonts such as Verdana, though not in the latest release of Verdana.

Dumb quotes

Dumb quotes exist because of typewriters. Apostrophes, open and close single and double quotes were reduced to two straightened characters out of pure economy. I can’t fault the inventors. Their machines were never intended for professional typesetting. I could however fault most of the assumptions made since about the necessity of and methods for accessing these ‘extra characters.’ Note how I use single quotes in that last sentence to mark what’s essentially a paraphrased term? If I can’t cite who said it, I feel like double quotes are a bit much. Of course, that’s definitely my own made-up convention.

Grave

Meanwhile, the grave accent character can be accessed all alone with a single keystroke. There it is at the top left of your keyboard, just below the escape key. This character is almost good for nothing on its own. Some truly well-meaning people have attempted to give this character something to do, such as indicate a glottal stop, or to make up for the lack of open single and double quotes. Fact is, it’s a combining character, not one to use on its own in professional typsetting unless it itself is the subject of discussion. Use key combinations to put the grave above other characters, such as the e above.

‘Okina, & similar characters

Speaking of glottal stop, the ʻokina above is represented by an open single quote, though it has its own character in Unicode called MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA at this address: U+02BB. ‘Okina is a Hawaiian character, but its representation in Unicode is used by other languages who have other names for it.

Prime

Lastly, primes are by contrast quite multi-use characters. In math, primes mark sequential varations of variables. You’ve also seen them marking coordinates on a map, arcminutes (one sixtieth of a degree) with a single prime, arcseconds (one sixtieth of one arcminute) with a double prime. The fractional units of arcsecond, milliarcsecond and microarcsecond, are not represented with triple prime ( ‴ ) and quadruple prime ( ⁗ ), just in case you were wondering. Prime and double prime can also be applied to minutes and seconds as measures of time. Above, in their most common role, they indicate feet and inches. What you see above are in fact italicized straight quotes, same as dumb quotes above, kerned. It turns out that primes aren’t so common in typefaces designed for professional typesetting, so it’s good to know where one has to make do.

Anyway, this is the introduction. Next week, we’ll wrap this up with some tips on how to use all these similar and easily-confusable characters, and what common pitfalls to look out for. Special thanks to Mark van Bronkhorst’s Verdigris for setting all the samples. Till Thursday, I’m David Sudweeks and this is Using Type.

Supria Sans’s design walks a path somewhere in between the British and German grotesque traditions, with an overall toughened and squared exterior, and a few sweet curves. The entire set includes a normal and condensed width, each with two sets of inclined forms. For emphasis, use either the optically-corrected oblique, or the perversely cute italic.
ITC Stone Serif is a marvel of legibility and evenness of color. Its tone is that of artlessness. As some font marketing copy makes a point of noting a typeface’s ‘true’ italics, let me borrow the term and say that Stone Serif’s bold is a true bold. (There’s a semi-bold if you’re not that kind of typographer.)

Catch Great Pairs here each Wednesday.

We often get requests from brides, wedding planners, etc. for help picking out just the right typeface(s) to represent that special day. In response, we’ve decided to dedicate a month of our blog to addressing various aspects of wedding collateral design.

Whether it’s invites, placecards, and/or websites for a traditional or non-traditional celebration we’ve got you covered in our regular series. Tune in Mondays for nuptial-focused Buyer’s Guide, Wednesdays for Great Pairs, and Thursdays for Using Type. We’ll also of course be creating some lovely Pinterest boards and calling out any new fonts that would work well to showcase your everlasting love.

Additionally we’ll be hosting two contests for a chance for both designers and couples to build up their font registries. Stay tuned for details.

The fun starts Monday, June 3rd right here on the FontShop Blog. We can’t wait to celebrate our love of fonts with you!

Heimat Stencil and Heimat Mono from Atlas are $90 until May 26. Relato by Emtype is 30% off until May 31st. Abdo Egypt and Abdo Joody from Abdo Fonts continues to be 30% off until June 2nd. Latinotype’s recent extension, Trend Hand Made, is $19 until June 12.

As always, subscribe to our newsletter and read this blog for tips on using type, Pinterest updates, and more.

FontFont

FF Dora » Webfonts Available

FF Signa Slab » Webfonts Available

Emigre

Alda CE

Filmotype

Orlando

Geen Bitter

Herman Mono

Hiba Studio

HS Alwafa  » Webfonts Available

Mint Type

Espuma

Moretype

Mic 32 Stencil  » Webfonts Available

Neapolitan

Griffy

Rochester

Seaweed Script

Skranji

Tipografies

Orenga

Pona Display

Wiescher

Nexstar  » Webfonts Available

Here are some suggestions on choosing the right desktop format.

OpenType (.otf) fonts typically have additional features that can only be accessed by programs that support them. OpenType works best in software like Adobe® Illustrator® and Adobe® InDesign®.

Although Microsoft Word 2010 supports some OpenType features, not all characters can be accessed if the font has a massive amount of alternates. For example, trying to access all the alternate swashes in Feel Script in PowerPoint would be painful. Don’t do it.

Also, you’ll only be disappointed further because OpenType fonts don’t embed well in PowerPoint.

If your workflow includes Microsoft Office programs, like Excel and Powerpoint, then we recommend licensing TrueType formats over OpenType. And if the font doesn’t have a TrueType version, contact us and we can suggest an alternate typeface that may work for you.

Besides new fonts and promotions, we love pinning cool type we find around the web! Check out how Oreo celebrated their 100th birthday or create a message in Neko Font (“Cat” Font) — follow us on Pinterest for weekly typographic finds!

This is the second half of last week’s piece on hierarchy. After giving this topic a week’s worth of thought, I realize that I’m not going to teach much of anything in this article. The subject is too broad. There are too many caveats to keep the end result down to a concise read. If you’d like to learn more about hierarchy, teach yourself something by trying things with hierarchical structure you’ve never tried before, which may or may not be illustrated and narrated below. The type in this piece comes from a previous Great Pair featuring Sindre Bremnes’s Telefon with Robert Slimbach’s Minion.

Above illustrates a couple of common approaches to hierarchical ordering. Breaking content down into logical groupings, and presenting them in an accessible order is what an effective hierarchy does. Beside obvious or common ways of accomplishing this (mostly reliant upon a header’s type size or numbered systems), there are other and better ways.

As mentioned in the piece before, a difference in scale can be measured by the negative space surrounding the element in question. Above I waste a spread in order to create a rhythmic disruption in the book at each chapter break. Below, I use the same content to create a different set of elements. The introductory text is set at the same size as its header (presumably in contrast to the type size in subsequent pages).

If it makes sense to do it, a change of layout can serve as a hierarchical device. Rather than use all your space for a main column of content, keep some space free for important notes of various kinds. Also, I recommend the common-sense stuff such as keeping all body text the same size, adhering to a baseline grid, and setting up styles properly.

Make use of sequential imagery, whether graphic, photographic or by using simple blocks of color, or colored type, or a device as simple as a progress bar. There are boundless intelligent ways of establishing and getting the most out of a clear, useful hierarchy, and if there’s one thing you take from this, I hope it’s that your education in this regard will be self-led, and fun if you remember to set fun rules to play by. Using Type continues here Thursday.

Lavigne was created to solve a specific problem in fashion publishing—not enough individuality among the typically bland modern/romantic type palettes characteristic to the industry. Though more well known for its Display cut, Lavigne Text settles down and gets to work at text sizes.

FF Netto, a plainspoken spurless UI/wayfinding face is probably best known for its extensive set of stylized icons.

Together, the two complement their counterparts, each serving as a proper foil to emphasize the best characteristics possessed by the other.

Great Pairs is a regular series. Catch it here each Wednesday.

Thursday, May 16th

• 3 p.m. – Nancy Birkhölzer/Reto Wettach
• 7 p.m. – Anthony Burrill

Friday, May 17th:

• 12 p.m. – Grzegorz Laszuk
• 4 p.m. – Simon Manchipp

Saturday, May 18th:

• 4 p.m. –  Paul Barritt
• 6 p.m. – Michael Johnson