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Wednesday, August 03, 2011

33 Typographic Sins...

  1. Two spaces between sentences
  2. Dumb quotes instead of smart quotes
  3. Dumb apostrophe instead of smart apostrophe
  4. Failing to tuck periods/ commas insides quotes marks
  5. Failing to kern display type
  6. Using two hyphens instead of an em dash
  7. Too many consecutive hyphens
  8. Large amounts of body text in uppercase letters
  9. Large amounts of revised type are hard to read
  10.  Using process colors for body text
  11.  Underlining titles instead of italicizing them
  12.  Under process colors for body text
  13. Failing to eliminate orphans
  14.  Rivers in justified text
  15. Inconsistent leading
  16. Indenting the first paragraph
  17. Indenting a paragraph too far
  18. Failing to hang punctuation into the margin
  19. Failing to use to create fractions
  20. Incorrectly abbreviating a.m. and p.m.
  21. Failing to provide margins for type in a box
  22. Faux italic/oblique bold and small cap type
  23. Strokes that encroach upon letterforms
  24. Horizontally scaled type
  25. Vertically scaled type
  26. Negative Letter spacing
  27. Bad line breaks in headlines and body text
  28. Failing to indent bulleted lists
  29. Failing to align baselines of type in adjacent columns of body text
  30. Stacking lowercase letters
  31. Failing to use accent marks
  32. Failing to correct bad rags
  33. Failing to use ligatures

1 comment:

  1. I need to put my 2¢ in here. It would be wrong if I didn't. These are great. It would be great to just know all these things, however, as we are not databases, it is good to have reference links for this type of information. For the record, bulleted lists, technically, should not be indented. In the industry, we have become accustomed to them indented. Consult "Elements of Typographic Style", Robert Bringhurrst.

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