Never seen a carriage return? Chances are good that you’ve never heard one either. But these invisible characters create far more formatting problems than anything else in digital stack. And the issue is, they’re not all the same. What’s considered a line break in a Python script isn’t the same as a line break in […]

The ampersand shows up most notably in logos. In a brand mark, it’s nice and sharp. It provides some sort of visual shorthand for heritage and partnership. Put it into a line of plain text, though? Often times it sticks out like a sore thumb. The thing is: unless you’ve seen it used both ways, […]

In today’s text, asterisk serves many purposes: to denote emphasis, to divide up scenes, to point to footnotes, or to obscure search terms containing wildcards. That versatility is useful until you realize it is also a recipe for chaos. But that flexibility can be dangerous. One single left-open star will break your document when pasted […]

That little character in your email address is the one we call “at” symbol. It’s not just punctuation. It’s a signal and sometimes that signal is noisy. Sometimes you’ve got a bunch of real emails, or social media handles, or metadata tags, or stray symbols used by some coding language. To our eyes, those all […]