Whoa, Canada!
The logo of The Canadian Press has been causing me a significant amount of psychic distress lately. This is likely because I am burdened by two distinct personality defects: I am a pathological stickler for English grammar, and I moonlight as a self-appointed tyrant of typography
The concept is genuinely brilliant. The design team performed a stroke of visual genius by "cleverly" repurposing the red fields of the Canadian flag into opening and closing quotation marks. It is a conceptual masterstroke—at least, in theory:
© The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
However, one might expect the legions of journalists and editors who comprise the organization—people whose very professional existence hinges on the precision of the written word—to have gently reminded the designers that “smart” quotation marks are governed by rigid anatomical rules. Whether you call them curly, curved, or typographic marks, they follow a very specific orientation that goes beyond simple aesthetics.
True opening quotation marks resemble a pair of commas rotated 180 degrees and hoisted to the top of the line, while closing quotation marks resemble standard commas raised to the same height. To use the shorthand of design nerds: they should evoke the numbers 66 and 99:
And when a pair of single quotation marks (or apostrophes) is used—as they are in the current logo—the marks should strictly resemble the numbers 6 and 9::
Consequently, the logo treats these marks with a level of geometric indifference that is, frankly, a bit tragic for a news agency. Had the quotation marks been executed with even a modicum of typographic literacy, the final product should have looked like this instead:
