I was starting to leave a comment on this excellent question when I realized I had come up with a second question which was equally intriguing.
If you're writing a story where 95% of the communication is signed, and you decide that you're simply going to use quotes to indicate signed speech, with attributives ("Where are you going?" he signed. "To Venice!" she responded, exaggerating the gestures in her excitement.), what happens when the signers come across someone who speaks aloud?
How is spoken speech formatted as a secondary or cameo-use language to signed speech?
Answer
FWIW, I faced exactly this problem in a novel I wrote a few years ago that included a large amount of both spoken and signed dialogue. Having such a large amount of italicized text was distracting for the reasons discussed in other answers, so my approach was a punctuation convention:
"Spoken dialogue goes in normal quotes like this," he said.
«But signed dialogue goes in guillemets,» she signed in response.
In the first few chapters I always pointed out the change in mode by adding a "said" or "signed" dialogue tag, but after that I regarded the convention as sufficiently well-established and only used the punctuation. My beta readers found this easy to follow and never once complained. Since the distinction between what was spoken and what was signed was sometimes important to the plot, this allowed me to signal these shifts without having to beat the reader over the head with it.
[I originally added this answer to your other question, but I think that it is actually more appropriate here.]
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