space after periods.

as a graphic designer, typography is a big part of my life. it’s easy to sit for hours with a piece of printed material and just look at letterforms, not really reading anything. typography is an underappreciate, and many type scholars would say a lost, and i would say ignored, art-form. i’m sure that never in the history of the general public has anybody stopped to make a remark about the beautiful stroke weight of a letter in garamond. most people just don’t pay that much attention. which is why the job of the typesetter is so important. in a way, you want the results of your handiwork to remain invisible, or at least taken for granted, because you want it to work subtley, subconsciously, to communicate your idea.

with all that in mind, this writing has very little to do with the art of typography, and more to do with my number one pet peave with set type: the extra space after a period at the beginning of a sentence.

it is a holdover from the day of the typewriter. i don’t know if many of you remember typewriters, but despite the mechanical brilliance they were not very smart machines. even i barely remember typewriters. when i was in high school we had electronic word processors for a semester before we moved up to computers for our typing class. i kind of miss the opportunity to actually spend some time working on one of those old beasts where you had to push a key down like six inches to type a letter. i would appreciate my super low-profile mac keyboard a whole lot more, like i appreciate my acoustic guitar so much more after playing my dad’s acoustic because the action on my strings is much lower and a lot more manageable.

but seriously, stop putting an extra space after your periods when you end a sentence! we are no longer using big, clunky, dumb typewriters. the computer spaces things correctly for us. i spend way too much of my life combing through copy for publications removing all those extra spaces. thank goodness for visible hidden characters in indesign!

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