apostrophe in vertical setting
Dick Margulis
apostrophe abuse, one post of which showed a sign in which a word was
written vertically and should have included an apostrophe but omitted
it--nothing unusual in retail signage these days.
Then a banner ad on a site I was just visiting this morning promoted a
sale for Levi's jeans, and I noticed something odd about the placement
of the apostrophe in the vertical version of the logo, which was
featured in the ad. This is the graphic on the small label sewn into the
edge of a back pocket on their garments:
http://www.fashionrehab.com.au/UserFiles/3755-Files/Image/Levis/390LEVIS_LOGO_NEW_PMS_.jpg
I haven't worn jeans in over thirty years and had never noticed this
before just now, primed to look for it, as I was, by the blog post I
mentioned.
Anyway, a couple of things to note. One is that with vertical setting,
we usually think in terms of monospaced fonts--or at least an egyptian
font with wide crossbars on the I. But here, what they chose was just a
good fatface, and it works fine. The other is the odd placement of the
apostrophe.
So here's my question: If you were the designer, where would you place
the apostrophe? I used to think there were three possibilities: to the
right of the I, to the left of the S, or on a line by itself. Levi's
chose a fourth option--making it a comma instead of an apostrophe, next
to the I--that I hadn't considered. What would your choice be?
I also hadn't noticed before that the whole logo is in an uncial sort of
case, with the lowercase e the same height as the L, V, I, and S.
Funny how you can see something like that for decades and never notice
it until you stare at it.
Armadillo
> So here's my question: If you were the designer, where would you place
> the apostrophe? I used to think there were three possibilities: to the
> right of the I, to the left of the S, or on a line by itself. Levi's
> chose a fourth option--making it a comma instead of an apostrophe, next
> to the I--that I hadn't considered. What would your choice be?
As a designer I would avoid situation like this as the first choice.
Placing characters vertically like this seldom works. Usually rotating text 90 degrees works often better, especially in print. Of course in narrow shop signs, neon signs, etc vertical placement is the only option.
In this case apostrophe is in the wrong place because it can be read as comma Levi,s or as Levis' instead of Levi's. If the apostrophe would be on the left side of 'I' it would retain compact shape and it could be read Levi's but also Lev'is.
I would probably put apostrophe just between I and S and line it horizontally with the other characters. It would also crate a gap between I and S just like in horizontal version. This is how punctuation is placed in vertically written japanese too.
Another option would be making a slightly smaller apostrophe before 'S' like
L
E
V
I
'S
This is because 'S' is the reason why it is included in the first place.
Jukka
Armadillo
... but also Lev,is.
Jukka
Ymir
Dick Margulis <marg...@comcast.net> wrote:
Actually, my interpretation of their design is that they chose the third
option, and then kerned it rather aggressively. I don't find the
placement of the apostrophe to be particularly bothersome. I doubt I
would have thought to do it this way myself, but the end result seems
fine to me.
Placing it before the s, while arguably more logical, would, I think,
make it too visually prominent since English speakers really aren't used
to seeing apostrophes at the beginnings of lines in non-poetic contexts,
and placing it on a fully-spaced line of its own would either destroy
the colour or require a grossly enlarged version of the apostrophe which
would, again, make it far too visually prominent.
André
Dick Margulis
>
> Actually, my interpretation of their design is that they chose the third
> option, and then kerned it rather aggressively. I don't find the
> placement of the apostrophe to be particularly bothersome. I doubt I
> would have thought to do it this way myself, but the end result seems
> fine to me.
Ymir,
Don't get me wrong. It doesn't bother me, either. If it bothered me, I
think I'd probably have noticed it before this. I agree with you that
it's an interesting solution. But the idea that the apostrophe is on a
separate line and then kerned vertically hadn't occurred to me. You may
be correct about the intent, but the result is that it's a comma
following the I. I think my choice would probably have been
L
e
V
I'
S
But that's just me. Obviously the label work's well enough for Levi Strauss.
Character
> But that's just me. Obviously the label work's well enough for Levi
> Strauss.
You did that on purpose, right? RIGHT?
- Ch.
Dick Margulis
Yes, definitely. Sure. Of course I did it on purpose. But now I'm going
to go have another cup of coffee anyway. Just to make sure I don't do it
on purpose again.
meg99az
perfect to me. I disagree that it looks like a comma-after-the-I. It is
where it should be as an apostrophe - BETWEEN the I and S.
- To put it where a normal apostrophe goes next to the top of the I, it
could have been confused as Lev'is.
- To put it ahead of the S would have been perfectly well understood, but
would have looked like cra'p.
- To put it between the I and S vertically could have been confusing - is it
comma or apostrophe? Worse yet, if it was between I and S vertically, then
if it was at the top of the space, as a normal apostrophe, someone might
have read it as such, but possibly as a comma-after-the-I; likewise, if it
was displaced to the bottom of the space to approximate to the S, then it
could have been interpreted as a comma.
The bottom line is that this is a logo - a strong graphic that tokenizes the
identity of some entity. We all know Levi's, its products, name, and logo.
Had this been a new brand logo for an unknown company, I still think that
most viewers would get the intent. We all know, for instance, that Levi's
is a proper English construct, whereas Levi,s would make no sense, so any
reader will figure out the intent, regardless of where the punctuation was
placed. It's like poetry - it can suspend the rules of common daily spoken
and written expository language, yet we can read and not only get the
meaning, but get meaning at higher levels of implication and abstraction. I
think the designer of this logo did it perfectly.
Some thoughts that come to mind though:
- This works in part because the apostrophe is next to the I, and fits in
with the overall balance of the design. Because the I is narrow, there is
plenty of room to place it, without having hanging punctuation. Imagine
that the logo was for LEV's. The concept would work just as well, because
there would be plenty of space to put the mark next to the base of the V.
If the logo was for LEA's, it might work, because the apostrophe would be
tucked in, at the top of the A, and the intent would remain obvious. But,
if the logo was for LEM's, the whole thing would not work, without
off-centering the M, or having a hanging mark, unbalanced, asymmetrical, and
far too wide. With logos, the artistic, visual, graphic aspects of the
design and perception are every bit as important as the classic
typographical considerations. I would submit that logos are art and design
more so than typography, bringing us back to the poetry analogy above.
- The problem would be stickier if you were trying to vertically typeset a
large amount of body text, or even just a whole sentence or two, in which
you had multiple punctuation - period, exclamation, parentheses, asterisk,
etc. You would then have to adopt some typographic convention about where
to place it all. Vertically in between characters would look good for some,
but not for others. Ampersand, exclamation, and asterisk would work well as
their own centered selves on their own tier, but I cannot imagine a
parenthesis looking comfortable that way, and colon's and semicolons there
would feel weird to me. The problems become stickier for comma and
apostrophe, because they could easily be confused for each other. Perhaps
you would use the usual curlicue character for comma, but a straight "quote"
for apostrophe. For me, a convention of placing the apostrophe on the same
line leading its character, such as 's or 't would make the intent perfectly
clear and unequivocal, and it might look okay for body text and fonts, but I
would find it ugly for decorative and display faces or logos.
To reiterate, with logos there shouldn't be any rules, just what looks good
and communicates effectively. For body text, I think you would have to work
this out individually for each job, depending on the intent, amount of text,
type and amount of punctuation, and the typefaces used.
. . . Nobody for the past few years has discussed much the concept of
"grunge", as in grunge typefaces, whether as artistic intent or lack of
design skills. Perhaps though that is your answer - pick the worst possible
messy font to set your vertical text - then have no rules whatsoever for the
punctuation, and the whole iconclastic approach to typography, while ugly,
and perhaps unreadable, will have its own cohesive anti-establishment
counter-culture rebellious esthetic that would be internally consistent.
- meg -
"Dick Margulis" <marg...@comcast.net> wrote in message
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