Don’t be hasty, use smart quotes

Today is National Punctuation Day (it’s totally a thing). To celebrate, I made Smart Quotes for Smart People, a single-serving site to spread awareness of a horrible vestige in today’s typography: dumb quotes.

Don’t be hasty. Today is the day. Take a moment to check your sites and your type—especially the big headlines—and correct your quotation marks and apostrophes. We’re not perfect, and neither are our systems, but we should strive to do better. And it’s so easy to get this right.

Every time you use a malformed apostrophe or quote, someone consciously decides to use Comic Sans. That’s two wrongs and both are your fault. And I know you’re smarter than that.

Check out Smart Quotes for Smart People today and starting righting typographic wrongs. Special thanks to Stephen Coles, Liz Danzico, and Grant Hutchinson for their keen proofing eyes.