TYPOGRAPHY
Anne Fries checks typographic
standards. What does that mean?
Full stops, commas, dashes – hopefully they’re all where they should be
Our clients write for professional purposes, which is why, naturally, we keep an eagle eye on typography and, if necessary, bend the inverted commas a little bit to the right or left, place them a tad higher, lengthen dashes, turn straight apostrophes into curly ones and make sure an accent hasn’t strayed onto the wrong letter.
Can a full stop be italicised?
Yes, it can, and in fact it should be if it comes after an italicised word – but we’re not quite that pedantic. Typographic details are also very important: if dashes, inverted commas, spaces, thin spaces, accents, apostrophes, etc. are used wrongly, the text doesn’t look professional. And it is difficult to read. All the better, then, if the typography is clean and precise.
Can you make a mistake where nothing is written?
You can. That’s why we check all the gaps in your texts: Are the spaces too big? Too small? Are they missing completely? Sometimes there are two in a row. It also doesn’t look good if the inverted commas are straight here and rounded there, or if the minus in the annual report is long here and short there. Time for us to put on our “typo glasses”, and make sure everything is consistent.