Marcin Wichary, the current design lead at Medium responsible for pushing forward on typographic niceties, grew up in Poland, and says in his youth, most computers simply omitted his language’s ę, ł, and other diacriticals. The only viable lingua franca was 7-bit ASCII, which included fewer than 100 characters, and omitted letters from alphabets outside English and curly quotes. At Next, he went further, and the web’s father, Tim Berners-Lee, built the first browser and server on a Next.īut in the early days of the web, different computing platforms-Unix, Mac, and Windows, primarily-didn’t always agree with how text was encoded, leading to garbled cross-platform exchanges.
#Vivadesigner smart quotes mac#
Jobs’s attachment to type famously stems from a calligraphy class taken at Reed College, and he ensured that the first Mac had a mix of bespoke and classic typefaces that included curly quotes and all the other punctuation a designer could want. This lack of quote sophistication is odd, because the web’s design origins owe a lot to choices Steve Jobs made at Apple and later at his second computer firm, Next. They are always in the font,” Carter says. “I have no idea why people don’t use proper quotes. This baffles Matthew Carter, a type designer whose work spans everything from metal type’s last stand to digital’s first, and whose dozens of typefaces, like Verdana and Georgia, are viewed daily by a billion-odd people. Even the fine publication you’re currently reading has occasionally neglected to crook its pinky. Fast Company opts generally for all “dumb” quotes online, while the newborn digital publication The Outline recently mixed straight and typographic in the same line of text at its launch. Not long ago, Rolling Stone had straight quotes in its news-item previews, but educated them for features the “smart” quotes later returned.
Major periodicals have fallen prey, including those with a long and continuing print edition. It may also be that curly quotes’ time has come and gone. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. But there’s a seemingly contrary motion afoot with quotation marks: At an increasing number of publications, they’ve been ironed straight. Many aspects of website design have improved to the point that nuances and flourishes formerly reserved for the printed page are feasible and pleasing. It’s a small, infuriating difference: "this" versus “this.” These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture.
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