The 33 Laws of Typography

01 Distrust default software settings

Law one: distrust default software settings. When you start a new document, the software has some
built in defaults that it's going to use for formatting your document. And a lot of these settings have
to do with typographic choices that you would make, like the typeface you'll be using. The type size.
Line spacing. Margin sizes. And text alignment. And these defaults exist because the software has to
start somewhere. But your job is to change all of these defaults. You wanna change these settings
and in fact, most, if not all of these default settings should be changed for every document you
create. So here are two business cards that both contain the same information. This first card was
created using software defaults, but on the second card, those defaults were changed and
typographic decisions were made by the card's designer. Now this first card contains all the
information we need, but it really doesn't tell us anything else about the company. It lacks
personality and it's really not that visually appealing or exciting to look at. It's not very memorable.
On top of that, it fails to communicate anything about the style and essence of The Mad Hatter. The
second card does a much better job of telling us more about the company. It contains all the same
necessary text information, but here we're also getting some clues. We're learning a little more
about The Mad Hatter. And we get the feeling that this company is fancy, it's a little upscale and it's
slightly formal. And we're getting a lot of these clues from the typographic choices that were made
by the designer. So let's examine each card piece by piece to learn more about these choices that
were made and how they affect the overall feel of this card. So first, the typeface. On the first card,
the typeface being used is called Minion Pro, and that's the default typeface in the software that we
used to create the card. And on the second card, two different typefaces are being used, and these
specific typefaces were chosen to create a more sophisticated tone. And when the typefaces that
you choose match the intended tone of the content, your message is going to be more memorable,
and it's also going to be much more powerful. So let's look at the type size. On the first card, all of
the text is the exact same size. It's all 12 points, the default type size. But on the second card, you
can see that there's a few different sizes being used. We've got large text, then we've got smaller
text, and then we've got even smaller text. And this mix of type sizes is helping to provide a visual
hierarchy, and what a visual hierarchy is going to do for your documents is create a start point and
an end point. A visual hierarchy tells readers where they should begin in your document, and it
provides a flow through that document. It tells readers where they should focus their attention. Now
let's look at text alignment. The first card is using all flush left, ragged right type, which is the default
text alignment. But on the second card, that default alignment has been changed, and all the text on
this card is horizontally centered. And what a horizontally centered alignment does, is it's creating a
more balanced business card, and it's also adding to the formal, fancy tone. Now line spacing. On the
first card, all the space between each line of text is the exact same. It's all 2.4 points, which is the
default line spacing. But on the second card, the line spacing's been customized and it's been
changed. You can see the line spacing is bigger in some places and it's smaller in other places. What
this line spacing does, or what these changes in line spacing do is they provide a visual rhythm, and
that's helping to chunk information, it's also providing pauses between these chunks. Let's
summarize. You're going to want to replace default software settings with appropriate typographic
settings, and when you do this, your documents are going to be more aesthetically pleasing, more
interesting, and more memorable. When you can align these settings and these choices to the
personality and tone of the content, you're going to achieve maximum effect. Your messages will be
more powerful, more memorable, and therefore, more effective. That's law one: distrust default
software settings.

02 Ensure good contrast between text and background

- Law 2. Ensure good contrast between text and background. When you're creating documents that
are meant to be read, you want to make sure that the text is legible. And all that means, legible text
is clear and easy to read. So a really important aspect of text legibility, is the amount of contrast
between the text and background. And so what exactly does contrast mean? Contrast is simply the
difference between two colors. And colors can be different in a lot of different ways. We're going to
focus on differences in lightness and darkness. Because these differences have the biggest effect on
text legibility. Here's an example of high contrast between text and background. And here we've got
black text on a white background. Black and white provide the highest possible contrast. And that's
because white is the lightest color, and black is the darkest color. So this high contrast makes it really
easy to see the difference between the text and background. And that helps make this text easy to
read. So here's an opposite example. Here's an example of low contrast between text and
background. Here we're using two different shades of grey, but the shades are really similar. And this
similarity makes it really difficult to see the difference between the text and background. There's low
contrast here. The low contrast makes the text very difficult to read and this can cause eye strain
and fatigue. If you're using color on your designs, the guidelines are basically the same. Colors
themselves don't affect text legibility. But what's important is the contrast between the colors or the
difference between the lightness and the darkness of each color. Here's an example of high color
contrast between the text and background. And here we've got dark blue text, on a light yellow
background. And here's an example of low color contrast between text and background. And just
like in our grey scale example, this low contrast is going to make this text pretty difficult to read.
While the high contrast example would be just fine. If you're designing with light text on a dark
background, this is called Reverse Type. And when there's a dark visually-heavy background, a lot of
times small thin strokes can get lost. And this is going to make your text harder to read. So Reverse
Type is fine for small chunks of text. You could use it for things like pull quotes and short headlines
when you're trying to call attention to something. But you should really avoid Reverse Type for large
amounts of text. And when you're using Reverse Type it's best to stick with typefaces that don't
contain really thin strokes. So for this reason, Sans Serif typefaces tend to work pretty well. Sans
Serif typefaces lack Serifs. Serifs are often really small and sometimes very thin and they can get
easily swallowed up by your dark background. Adding some letter spacing can also help with
legibility when you're working with Reverse Type. And this extra spacing helps keep the dark
background from swallowing up the lighter text. And if you look in this example you can see that
there's some extra horizontal space between each of these characters. And that's Letterspacing.
Some software programs also call this "tracking." So far, we've looked at a bunch of examples but
they've all been solid text on solid backgrounds. Legibility can become even more problematic when
you're dealing with pattern backgrounds or photographic backgrounds. It can be challenging to find
the text color that provides high contrast with all the different parts of a complex background. You
really want to avoid these complicated backgrounds, unless you're going to make sure that you
provide the necessary contrast and make the text legible. So here's some text that we've overlaid on
photograph. And this text is pretty difficult to read, even though it's just a small chunk. And that
difficulty is because there's a lack of contrast between the text and all the different colors that
appear in this complicated photographic background. So now, we've added a dark rectangle behind
the text. And you can see that that's helped providing plenty of contrast between the text and all the
different colors that are found in the background. And that's really helping this text stand out, and
make that text much more legible. Remember that if you're creating a presentation that you're going
to be projecting onto a wall, the color of that wall will also affect your presentation. And depending
on what type of wall you're projecting on, that wall can become a complicated background. So you
want to avoid projecting on to walls that have a lot of patters, textures, wallpaper. You want to try to
project onto light colored solid walls where there're no patters and no textures. Let's summarize.
You want to make your documents as legible as possible. And one way you can assure this is true, is
by making sure that there's high contrast between text and its background. If you're creating text-
heavy documents, dark text on a solid light background is easiest to read. That's Law 2. Ensure good
contrast between text and background.

03 Avoid chart junk and page junk

- Law 3, Avoid Chartjunk and Pagejunk. These may be new terms for you, so let's start with a
definition. Chartjunk is the excessive and unnecessary use of graphical elements in charts and
graphs. So, let's look at an example to better understand this concept. Here's a chart that is loaded
with chartjunk, and this chartjunk is showing up as thick dark rules, darkly shaded background, all
these pattern fills, and the large heavy text that's been used. Now, here's the same chart with the
same information but without all the chartjunk, and you can see in this example that everything in
this chart is adding or clarifying meaning, and that's what you want when you're creating charts and
graphs. If you have elements that are not adding or clarifying meaning, get rid of them. Now, for the
elements that are adding meaning, reduce them down to their simplest form. So, that means if you
have borders that can be thinner, make them thinner. If you have shading that can be lighter, make
it lighter. Keep reducing the graphic elements down until they're as simple as they can be but they're
still visible and still meaningful. You also want to watch out for pagejunk, and pagejunk is the
excessive and unnecessary use of graphical elements on pages. Pagejunk often shows up as boxes,
shadows, and rules. So, here's an example of a flyer that's suffering pretty badly from pagejunk, and
you can see there's so many unnecessary graphical elements on this page. The result is pretty
unprofessional looking. This page is very crowded. It's a very distracting design. There's so much
going on that it's hard to know where to look first. So, here's the same flyer, and it's been redesigned
with no pagejunk. You can see that overall the effect is more professional. The page looks lighter. It's
more organized. It's more pleasing to look at. And so, all of these things added together equal that
this page is more effective at communicating its message. Now, it's not that you shouldn't ever use
boxes and rules and shadows. Boxes and rules can be a great way to add visual interest. You can use
them to highlight elements. They can group elements, but it can be easy to go overboard when
you're using these things, and so, you want to minimize the number of different elements on a page,
and you want to keep the design of your boxes and rules pretty simple. You want to watch out for
things like double rules, fancy rules, overly thick rules. All of these things look clunky. They look very
heavy, and they will junk up your page very quickly, and this is what's going to create pagejunk in
your documents. Remember that when you're using boxes and rules, text needs room to breathe.
Here's an example of text that's been crowded inside a box, and it looks like this text is just stuffed in
there. There's not enough margin. Overall, this looks unprofessional. It looks very very crowded and
tight. So, here's the same text, still inside a box, but now there's plenty of space for this text to
breathe.
The margins are better. It's lighter, and the effect is much more professional overall. If you're using
rules, the same guidelines would apply. Here's some ruled text, and there's really not enough space
between this text and the rule below it.

You can see that that rule is pushed up pretty tight against the bottom of that text. And here's the
same text, still with the rule, but now there's plenty of space for that text to breathe. Keep in mind
that the borders of your document also form a box and that your content has to live inside this box,
and so, just like with the boxes and rules, you want to pad your content with an appropriate amount
of white space.
You don't want to jam your content into this box. So, here's an example where that's exactly what's
happened. This content has been crowded onto this page. The margins are too small.

The content doesn't have room to breathe. There's so much content and so little white space that
it's creating a pretty uninviting page, and this page looks like a big heavy gray block. Now, here's the
same page, and it's been redesigned with an appropriate amount of white space, and you can see
here that the white space is really being used as a design element. White space, when it's used
properly, is so much more than leftover space on the page.

White space adds professionalism to your documents. It adds sophistication, and it gives your
readers a visual break. White space keeps your pages from being text-heavy gray blocks, and it
makes your documents a lot more approachable and inviting. Let's summarize. Every element on
your page or in your chart or graph should add or clarify meaning. If an element's not adding or
clarifying meaning, then it's junking up your document. It's creating pagejunk or chartjunk, and this
is distracting readers from your message. That's Law 3, Avoid Chartjunk and Pagejunk.

04 Enforce a consistent style within a document

- Law four, Enforce Consistent Style Within a document. When you're designing documents you
want to maintain visual consistency between similar elements. And some of these elements that
may appear in your document would include chapter titles, headings sub-headings, body text, image
captions, page headers, and page footers. You want to pick a typographic style for each of these
elements and then enforce that style throughout your document. Your goal is for all similar elements
to be formatted consistently. So this means that all body text should be formatted to look the same.
All captions should be formatted to look the same. All headings, sub-headings, page headers, and
page footers should all be formatted consistently throughout your document. So lets take a look at
what happens when this isn't true. This is a page where consistent styles have not been applied. And
you can see if we take a look at the image captions for instance, in this caption, the text is italicized
and it's right aligned. But in this image caption the text is not italicized and the text here is center
aligned. These image captions are not even set in the same typeface, this caption is farther away
from the image then this caption. And the same inconsistencies apply to the chapter titles. Each
chapter title is actually different then the others. This chapter title is 14 point bold text with a one
point rule. But this chapter title is 12 point text with a thicker three point rule. Some of the chapter
titles are bold, others are not bold, some chapter titles are all upper case, others are not. And even
in the body text if we look at the final paragraph there's extra space between each of these lines of
text and it's different from the rest of the body text. That means that this last paragraph has more
leading than the others. Overall the design of this document is pretty confusing. When your readers
are comparing different elements it's difficult to know what each one of them is. If we look at the
image captions, is this an image caption or is this a different type of caption. Is it something else
entirely. The title for chapter two looks very different from the title for chapter three. It's hard to
know if that's on purpose and if so, why would that be. The visual design of this document creates
questions and confusion. It distracts from the message.

And that's exactly the opposite of what we want to do when we're creating documents. The result is
an unorganized and ineffective document. So here's the same page with the same content that's
been redesigned and this time consistent formatting has been applied throughout. You can see now
each chapter title is formatted using a consistent style. The same is true for body text and the image
captions. So now the result is a document that looks professional and clean. There are no
distractions from the message here. Its easy for your readers to quickly scan this page and know
which elements are related to others. This visual consistency allows readers to focus on the content.
It also gives the document a professional appearance. So before you begin creating a document it's
important to do some upfront preplanning and decide what elements your document will contain
and then make decisions about how to format each of these elements. You're going to want to make
decisions like what typeface you'll be using, the type sizes, text alignment, and leading. If you do this
up front you're going to save yourself a lot of time, especially if you create large multi-page
documents. Now the good news is that most software programs will allow you to set styles for
different text elements. And using these styles is a really great way to enforce consistency in a
document and also automate this process for yourself. Make it a lot easier. So if you learn how to
use these styles you're going to save yourself time and you're going to avoid headaches. And a really
nice thing is that if you do use styles and then you change your mind about a particular element, like
if you want to change the type style of all your headings, you can go in and modify this style one
time and it updates throughout your document. If you're designing a website, you're going to want
to use css or Cascading Style Sheets and that will accomplish the same thing. Let's summarize,
enforcing consistent style throughout your documents allows readers to focus on the content. This
means that your documents are going to be more effective, they're also going to look a lot more
professional. Enforcing consistent style helps visually group related elements and this makes it
obvious to readers which elements are similar to others in your documents. That's law four, Enforce
Consistent Style Within a Document.

05 Maintain a visual hierarchy

- Law five, Maintain a Visual Hierarchy. Maintaining a visual hierarchy is going to make your
documents more professional, and it will make your messages more memorable. A visual hierarchy
directs the flow of a document and it does this by making the document structure clear to your
readers. So, a document structure may include things like document titles, chapter titles, headings,
subheadings, body text, page headers, and page footers. And so, your job is to format each of these
elements in a way that makes this structure visible. Now, a document structure is hierarchical, and
that means that some elements are subordinate to other elements. Your goal is to reveal this
hierarchy and each element's place in it. And there are a lot of different ways you can indicate visual
hierarchy. You can use bold, italics, type size, type face, type weight, white space, rules, boxes,
leading, letter spacing, or uppercase characters. So, let's look at a typical document hierarchy. At the
top level, we've got the document title. Then there are level one headings, which are subordinate to
the document title. Level two headings are subordinate to level one headings. Body text is
subordinate to all the headings and all the subheadings. Image captions are subordinate to the body
text. And document headers and footers are subordinate to the image captions. So, the visual
attributes of each element should correspond to that element's place in the document hierarchy.
That means each subordinate element should be formatted to look subordinate. This will help
readers know where to begin in your document and also how to understand your document's flow.
A visual hierarchy is going to add variety to your documents, it's going to add visual interest as well.
The visual hierarchy keeps your pages from looking too grey and too monolithic.
Here's a page that lacks a visual hierarchy and you can see that all the text on this page is set at the
same type size and the same type face, with the exact same amount of emphasis. There are no visual
cues that provide any information about the difference between the title, headings, and body text.
And because everything on this page looks so similar, there's no obvious starting point, and overall,
the result is a very grey, very dull page. There's really no visual interest to attract readers. There's
nothing to really tell them where to begin, and there's not much that's going to keep their interest.
So here's a page with a different problem.

The elements on this page don't maintain a visual hierarchy. When we look at this document, it's
pretty difficult to get a quick grasp of each element in the document, and it's relationship to all the
other elements. So, if we look at it, the image caption, page header, and page footer are all larger
than the body text. The subheadings are larger than the book title. The chapter title is the same size,
and it's also the same weight as the body text. Look at the words "Chapter Five", these are the
largest words on the page. So ask yourself, are these really the most important words on this page?
They're probably not, but the way they're formatted they call the most attention to themselves, and
they certainly look like the most important words on the page. Overall, this visual formatting is
pretty confusing. It draws attention away from the content of the document, and that's always going
to be a bad thing. Now, here's a page where a visual hierarchy has been established, and it's also
been maintained throughout the document. And this visual hierarchy provides a very clear,
professional, organized framework. Even if you couldn't read this content, it's clear that this is the
document title because it's the largest text on the page, and it's bold. You can see that the level one
heading is also bold but it's smaller than the document title because it's subordinate. The words
"Chapter Five" are smaller than the level one heading. They're also not bold because they're not as
important as the name of the chapter. The subheadings are bold but they're smaller than the level
one heading, they're also italicized to make them a little different. The body text is smaller than all
the headings and the image caption is smaller and is lighter than the body text. The page header and
page footer are the smallest elements on this page. So, here a clear hierarchy has been established,
and it's been maintained throughout the page. The visual design of each page element reinforces
this hierarchy. So, before you begin creating a document, you're gonna want to do some preplanning
and decide what elements your document will contain and then you'll be ready to make some design
decisions about how you want to format each element so that a clear visual hierarchy is created and
maintained. You can use your software's built-in style sheets to help set up and apply and maintain
this consistent hierarchy throughout your document. And if you're a web designer, using Cascading
Style Sheets, or CSS, is going to help provide the same framework. Let's summarize. Maintaining a
visual hierarchy is important so that a document structure is quickly clear to readers. A visual
hierarchy gives readers an obvious starting point, and it directs the flow of a document. Using a
visual hierarchy is going to make your documents more professional, more organized, more
engaging, and more effective. That's law five, Maintain a Visual Hierarchy.

06 Group related page elements

- Law six, Group Related Page Elements. In most documents you're going to have some elements
that are related to others in the same document. For example, headings are related to sub-headings.
Sub-headings are related to paragraphs. And captions are related to images. So when you look at a
document, these relationships should be obvious. Related elements should be physically close to
each other in order to form a visual group. There's a Gesalt Principle that's called the Law of
Proximity and this law states when people perceive an assortment of objects, they perceive objects
that are close to each other as forming a group. Let's see how we can apply this Law of Proximity to
our document design and topography. Here is an example of a page with some sub-headings and
you can see that the sub-headings are equally distant from the text above them and the text below
them.

This equal distance actually makes it look like these sub-headings are floating in space. They're
really not visually anchored to anything on the page and it's not clear that they're related to
anything on the page. They look like standalone pieces of text. But we know that sub-headings are
not standalone pieces of text, we know that each of these sub-heads is like a little headline for the
paragraph that follows it. So let's see how we can fix this issue. Here's the same page, but this time
we've moved the sub-heads and we've moved them closer to the body text that they relate to. You'll
see that there's more space on top of these sub-headings then there is below them. What this does
is it makes the relationship between the sub-heads and the paragraphs that follow them much more
obvious. It's much more clear that these sub-headings are related to these paragraphs of body text.
Here are two examples of images with captions. In the first example, there's quite a bit of white
space on top of the caption. In the second example, the captions been moved up and now it's closer
to the image to which it refers. So looking at the first example, the captions not visually tied to the
image or anything else on the page. The caption looks like it's a little standalone piece of text. And
the second example it's much more clear that the image and the caption below it are related
because of their physical proximity. Be aware that the opposite of this law is also true. If object are
not related to each other, they should be moved farther apart. Here's an example of a page that
contains headers and footers. You an see that the headers and footers are really close to the body
text on this page, and the page is getting very visually crowded. When you first look at it, it's really
hard to even see the difference between the body text and the headers and the footers because
they're all so close together. Now since the headers and footers are not directly related to the body
text, they should be physically separated from it. So now in this example you can see that we've
done that. The headers and footers have been moved closer to the margins of the document where
they belong and the body text has been given some breathing room. And this makes the relationship
much more clear. When you make these relationships obvious readers are able to quickly grasp the
relationship between elements on your page and your documents are more effective at
communicating. Let's summarize. Related page elements should take advantage of the Gesalt Law of
Proximity. This means that related elements should be physically closer together on a page and that
unrelated page elements should be physically separated from each other. This helps to define the
relationship of these elements to each other. It also helps form visual groupings in your documents
that's going to make your documents easier to read and make them more effective at
communicating. That's law six, Group Related Page Elements.

07 Set printed body text from 9 to 11 points

- Law Seven, Set Printed Body Text at Nine to 11 Points. When you're creating a document that's
meant to be read, you want to make sure that the text is legible, and legible text is simply text that is
clear and easy to read. An important aspect of legibility is type size, so choosing the right type size is
an important part of document design. First, let's talk about how type is measured, and we'll go over
a few important terms that you may or may not be familiar with.
The x-Height of a typeface is the height of a lowercase x in that typeface. X-Heights are going to
change from one typeface to another. You may have one typeface that has a really large x-Height
and another typeface at the same size that has a smaller x-Height. The baseline is the imaginary line
that letters sit on. It's sort of like the lines on a ruled sheet of paper.

Ascenders are the parts of lowercase letters that extend above the x-Height as seen in the
lowercase h or a lowercase b. Descenders are the parts of lowercase letters that extend below the
baseline. You can see some descenders here in this lowercase g, in this lowercase y. If you're dealing
with print documents and presentation software, type is measured in points, and you'll hear
designers talk about type on a page or in a document, and you'll hear them talk about 11-point type
or 12-point type, 48-point type, and there are 72 points in one inch, so on a printed page, 36-point
type would be half an inch tall.
The way type is measured is it's measured from the top of the ascenders to the bottom of the
descenders in a typeface. Here we have some 36-point type, and here we have 36-point type, and
you can see that one typeface set at 36 points can look really different from another typeface that's
set at the same size, and this is because of the different x-Heights in these typefaces and also the
different heights of the ascenders and descenders. If you're a web designer, type size works a little
differently. Users can actually change the size of the text on a webpage in their browser by changing
their browser settings. Online type's also measured a little differently, and you can specify it in a few
different ways. You can specify type sizes in absolute terms like this or you can use relative terms like
this. It's important to properly size the body text in your documents because body text makes up the
bulk of multipage documents. It's the text that you're going to want people to be able to focus on
and read. If body text isn't legible, then your document is not legible. In a print document, you want
to size your body text at nine to 11 points for maximum legibility. Body text that is smaller than nine
points can be difficult to read for long passages, and body text larger than 11 points often looks
pretty large on the page, and it appears heavy and clumsy. If you're creating a document that's going
to be printed, it's really important that you print that document to review the type sizes. A lot of
times text on the screen may look great, but when it's printed, I often find that it looks too big and
needs to be made smaller. For websites, body copy is usually sized at 12 pixels to 16 pixels. Any
specific needs that your audience may have would outweigh these conventions, so, for example,
older and younger audiences usually benefit from larger-than-normal type sizes, so keep that in
mind if you're designing for a specific audience. Let's summarize. To make your documents as legible
as possible, choosing the right type size is a really important decision. Type that's too large can look
heavy on the page or on the screen, and type that's too small can be difficult and straining to read.
When you're choosing type sizes, it's really important to review your documents in the environment
in which it's going to be finally used. Print documents should be printed, and presentations should
be projected on a wall. Websites should be coded up and reviewed in a web browser. That's Law
Seven, Set Printed Body Text at Nine to 11 Points.

08 Set body text two to three alphabets wide

- Law eight. Set body text two to three alphabets wide. When you're creating a document that's
meant to be read you wanna make sure that the text is legible. And we've talked about this before
but legible text is simply text that is clear and easy to read. An important aspect of legibility is line
length. Now, line length refers to the length of a line of text. It's the same thing as the width of a
block of text. It's important that you set your body text blocks at a width that's just right. You don't
want them to be too narrow and you don't want the width to be too wide. Here's an example of
body text where the line length is too narrow. And because these lines of text are so short your
readers are going to be constantly jumping from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the
next. And that can be a little tiring and a little distracting. Narrow text blocks can also cause odd right
margins if your text is set flush left. And this jagged edge is pretty visually distracting. It makes the
paragraph look messy. In this example both the right and left edges are flush because this text is
justified. Now, in order to force both sides of this text block to be flush the software is going to add
white space or gaps between these words. And this white space and these gaps can greatly disrupt
the flow of the body text and actually make it more difficult to read. You'll notice how in some blocks
of text the white space between words will start to group together. It'll start to form a continuous
line of white space that actually flows through your paragraphs. And because of this effect these
gaps are called rivers. In this example the line length is set too wide. And this can make it difficult for
readers eyes to follow this line of text because it's so long. Especially when they're moving from the
end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. Now in this example the line length is just right.
You can see that the right edge of the text is smooth, it's fairly even but the text block isn't set so
wide that it's difficult to read. So for maximum legibility, the width of your text blocks should be two
to three alphabets wide. And a way to figure out how to do this is to set a block of text using the
typeface and the type size that you intend on using for your body text. And then count the number
of characters including spaces. The width of your text block should be 52 to 78 characters wide. And
that's about two to three alphabets worth of letters. This is the ideal line length for body text, for
your chosen typeface at your chosen type size. So if your text size gets larger or smaller, or if you
decide to choose a different typeface, you're going to wanna recalculate the optimal line length
because it will change. If you've chosen a more complicated, slightly fancy typeface or if you're using
reverse type, you're gonna wanna use a shorter line length for maximum legibility. So you'd wanna
choose a width of two alphabets or even a little bit less as a good place to start. If you're using
justified text you're going to want a longer line length to reduce rivers. So a width of three alphabets
is a good place to start. Let's summarize. The width of your body text has a big effect on text
legibility. If your body text is set too wide or too narrow it can make the text more difficult to read.
Narrow text blocks also have issues that can make them less visually attractive. So for maximum
legibility set your body text at two to three alphabets wide. This is an easy way to obtain optimal line
length. That's law eight. Set body text two to three alphabets wide.

09 Favor flush-left, ragged-right body text

- [Voiceover] Law 9: Favor flush left, ragged right body text. Text alignment is one of the choices that
you're going to need to make when you're formatting body text. Because body text makes up the
bulk of multi-page documents, the type of alignment you choose has a big effect on the document as
a whole. The most common alignments used for body text are flush left and justified. This is flush
left, ragged right text. In flush left text, you can see that the left edge of the text forms a straight line
and the right edge is ragged. This means that the right edge is allowed to be uneven. The shape of
the right edge of this text block is determined by where the words end and the lines naturally break.
Now this is justified text. Justified text is text that has both flush left and flush right edges. You can
see in this block of text, the left edge forms a straight line and the right edge also forms a straight
line. So when text is set justified, in order to force the right edge to form a straight line, the software
is going to add extra space between words. Depending on the software you're using, justifying text
can cause large gaps of white space between words. When these horizontal gaps between the words
are actually larger than the vertical gaps between the lines of text, the horizontal gaps will visually
merge together. And they're going to appear to flow through your paragraphs or your blocks of text.
When that happens, these horizontal gaps have formed rivers. Rivers call a lot of attention to
themselves, and they pull attention away from the text in your document, and that's always a bad
thing. You want readers to focus on the content in a document, not on distractions caused by design
decisions. Shorter line lengths are going to cause larger, more frequent rivers. So if you must justify
body text, you need to make sure that your line length is long enough to minimize rivers. A line
length of 3 alphabets or 78 characters is a good place to start. The best solution is to use flush left,
ragged right alignment for body text. Flush left text is a more natural, modern convention, and it will
make your documents look more modern and less rigid. In flush left alignments, all words have equal
space between them, and so rivers are not a problem. Let's look at some other text alignments and
talk about why you might use them. This is flush right, ragged left text. In flush right text, you can see
that the right edge of the text forms a straight line and the left edge is ragged. In documents, you'll
see flush right alignment used to format elements like figure captions, author attributions, quotes,
maybe tabular data. Languages that are read right to left, like Arabic and Hebrew, are set flush right.
Flush right alignments are also used in single page documents like posters, invitations, maybe
business cards, to group elements and add some visual excitement or interest to the page. Another
alignment option is centered text. When text is horizontally centered, there's a strong center axis
and both the right and left edges are ragged. Center text is often used for document titles, formal
invitations, and other documents where a more stable, conservative mood is desired. Let's
summarize. Flush left, ragged right is the best choice for body text alignment. Flush left text
eliminates rivers and make your documents look more modern. That's Law 9: favor flush left, ragged
right body text.

10 Separate sentences with one space, not two

- Law 10: Separate sentences with one space, not two. Many people were taught, and are still being
taught, that when typing, two spaces should be added at the end of a sentence. This is a convention
that exists because of outdated technology. It was never meant to be applied to modern
professionally produced documents. Here's a paragraph that is set with two spaces between each
sentence. And this paragraph is set with one space between each sentence. The point of a document
is for readers to focus on the text, not the spaces between sentences. In this first example, the extra
spaces call way too much attention to themselves. The amount of white space is jarring, and it's
disrupting the flow of the paragraph. In the second example, the spaces between sentences don't
get in the way and overall, the paragraph is much more visually pleasing. If you open a modern
professionally typeset book, magazine, brochure, or other printed document, you will see one space
between all sentences. So why do people use two spaces at the end of sentences? This convention
exists because of the typewriter. It's important to understand that typewriters and computers are
very different machines, and each has unique capabilities and requirements. One big difference
between typewriters and computers is the typefaces that are available on each. Typewriters have
mechanical requirements that dictate the use of monospaced typefaces. An example of a
monospaced typeface that you may have heard of is Courier. In contrast, almost all typefaces on
modern computers are proportionally spaced typefaces. So what does that mean? In a monospaced
typeface, all characters are given the same amount of horizontal space. But in a proportionally
spaced typeface, each character is given a different amount of horizontal space depending on the
character size and shape. This makes sense, doesn't it? A lower case 'i' and an upper case 'W' are not
the same width and shouldn't be given the same amount of horizontal space. In a monospaced
typeface, a space is as wide as every other character on the page. It became a convention to use two
spaces at the end of a sentence so that the break between sentences would be visually obvious. In a
proportionally spaced typeface, characters are all different widths, so one space is plenty to signal a
break between sentences. Two spaces at the end of a sentence are not needed and are incorrect
when creating documents on a computer. Now, you may have never used a typewriter, so why
would you be following a typewriter convention? Probably because you were taught by someone
who did use a typewriter and didn't know that the rules need to change when you're creating
documents on a computer. If you're a person who creates text content, stop hitting the space bar
twice between sentences. It's an old convention, and it's no longer needed. If you receive content
that was created by someone else, the first thing you should do with these documents is perform a
quick search-and-replace. Get rid of the double spaces, and replace them with single spaces. Let's
summarize. Putting two spaces at the end of a sentence is an old convention that exists because of
the typewriter. These extra spaces are disrupting the visual flow of the text in your document and
calling attention to themselves. This is pulling attention away from the text in your document. So get
rid of those extra spaces. It's an easy way to make your documents instantly more professional.
That's Law 10. Separate sentences with one space, not two.

11 Don't allow less than seven characters on a line

Law 11: Don't allow less than seven characters on the line. When you're formatting paragraphs of
text, sometimes a single word, or maybe a short phrase, is going to end up as the last line of a
paragraph. It's pretty much inevitable. Notice how this dangling word is causing visual unbalance in
our paragraph. Because our paragraph is not sitting on a visually stable base, it looks like it could
even just tip right over. And besides being visually unappealing, having just one word on this last line
is also wasteful. We've used an entire line for just our one little word. And that's just not a good use
of white space. White space in your designs should be planned. This is unplanned, wasted white
space. You may hear people talk about these short lines of text or you may read something about
them, and sometimes they get referred to as 'widows,' sometimes they get referred to as 'orphans,'
and if you start poking around, you'll see that there are a lot of different conflicting definitions and
uses of these two terms. There's not a lot of agreement out there on exactly what they mean and
how they're used. But for our purposes, it doesn't really matter. It's not all that important to unravel
this confusion. You can call it whatever you want, just eliminate them. A minimum of seven
characters on a line of text is a good rule of thumb, and that's a pretty good place to start. Keep in
mind that our goal here is good visual balance while efficiently using the space on our page. So the
exact number of characters is not all that important as long as you're achieving this goal. And so now
you can see, we fixed the issue. And in this example, we're using the same text as before, but the
dangling final word is no longer there. And we fixed it by widening our text block just a little bit. And
by doing that, by widening the text block, we caused the text of this paragraph to re-wrap, or re-
flow, and now that final word jumped up to the previous lines. So we no longer have our one little
dangling word at the end of our paragraph. Widening the text block is one way to fix this issue, but
there are many other possible fixes as well. And the solution that you choose is going to depend on
how much flexibility you have in either changing your page design or possibly editing the text. If you
have the ability to edit the content, this is often the best choice for long blocks of text. By adding or
modifying or even deleting a word or two, you can usually fix the problem of dangling words. If
editing the text is not an option, and sometimes it just may not be, you're going to need to make
some adjustments to the document design. And these adjustments could include things like
changing the size of the text to make it either a little bit larger or maybe a little bit smaller. You can
also force a word to wrap down to the next line of text, and you can do this by using what's called a
'soft return.' A soft return is created when you hold down the shift key and then hit the enter key on
your keyboard. A soft return is an invisible character and it signals the end of a line. When you hit
the enter key on your keyboard, that's called a 'hard return,' and that signals the end of a paragraph.
You can also insert a non-breaking space, and a non-breaking space is a special space character. And
what it does is, it forces words to stay together on the same line of text. And so if you put a non-
breaking space in between the last two words of your paragraph, those two words would always
appear together on the same line. They're not allowed to be broken at the space. Non-breaking
spaces are also available in HTML, if you're a web designer, and you access them by using this
character entity. This law applies not only to body text, but you also want to use this same law if
you're dealing with document titles, subheadings, invitation text, et cetera. You want to avoid having
fewer than seven characters per line in all your documents. Here's an example where we've got a
title, and you can see that there's some dangling text here. And then here's the same title, without
the dangler. We fixed this by making the size of the title just a little bit smaller, and it was small
enough to force that last line to jump up to the previous line of text. So it's no longer all by itself.
And you can see just by looking at this how much better it looks. Now the text is visually balanced,
the large gap is gone, and we're not wasting all of that white space. So here's an example of a party
invitation where there's some unbalanced, dangling text. And then here's a better, visually balanced
version. Our invitation looks better, it's cleaner, and the dangling text is not getting in the way and
calling so much attention to itself. Let's summarize. Always fix your dangling words and phrases.
These short lines of text are disrupting the balance in your documents and on your pages. They're
wasting space, and they're calling too much attention to themselves. These dangling words and
these dangling phrases are also disrupting the flow of text in your documents. So fixing these
dangling words is going to make your documents look more professional. They'll look more visually
appealing. And you're going to be maximizing the use of space on your pages. That's Law 11: Don't
allow less than seven characters on the line.

12 Avoid bad paragraph breaks

- Law 12, Avoid Bad Paragraph Breaks. When you're creating a document that has a large amount of
text, that text will most likely be broken into paragraphs, and these paragraphs are going to have to
break across pages in your document. When paragraphs do break across pages, it's important to
make sure that they're breaking well, that they're breaking at good places. In other words, avoid bad
paragraph breaks. What exactly does that mean? Here's an example of a bad paragraph break. You
can see that this line of text at the top of this page is actually the last line of text from the paragraph
on the previous page. When a paragraph contains multiple lines of text, you don't want to leave one
line of text at the beginning of a page. You don't want the paragraph to break that way. You also
don't want to leave one line of text at the end of a page, and here's an example of that type of bad
break. This line of text right here is actually the first line of a paragraph that continues on the next
page. Now, keep in mind that we're talking about paragraph breaks here, so we're talking about
paragraphs that contain more than one line of text. If you have paragraphs in your document that all
fit on one line, then it's fine for those lines of text to appear at the beginning or the end of a page.
There's no paragraph break there. In multi-line paragraphs, you want to keep at least two lines of
text grouped together at all times. Keeping at least two lines of text together forms a block or a
group that carries more visual weight than just one little line of text. When you allow your
paragraphs to break across pages and leave these single lines of text at the beginning or the end of a
page, you're not only creating visual unbalance, but you're also breaking up the point of the
paragraph or the text in a paragraph in a way that makes it a little bit harder to read and a little bit
more difficult for readers to stitch those thoughts back together while they're reading. This is
another type of bad break. You don't want to leave a heading or a subheading by itself at the bottom
of a page. This heading goes with the paragraph that follows it, right? We know that they should be
grouped together, but the paragraph starts on the next page for this heading, so by allowing our
paragraph to break here, we've completely disrupted the flow of the document, and we've made it
just a little bit harder for the reader to understand exactly what's going on. Here, we fixed this break.
A subhead should always be followed by at least two lines of text. There are lots of different ways
that you can fix bad breaks, and there's really not a one-size-fits-all solution. The solution you choose
and the way you fix your bad breaks is really going to depend on the specific content you're working
with and your ability to change either the page design or to edit the content. If you can change the
text or the content, or maybe if you have a close working relationship with the author or the editor,
editing the text is often the easiest way to fix bad breaks. Sometimes just by adding, deleting, or
modifying a few words, you can make enough of a difference to fix your bad break issue. If editing
the text isn't an option, and sometimes it just won't be, you're going to need to make some
adjustments to the document design, and these adjustments could include maybe using your
software settings to change what are called the Keep Options. Keep Options tell your software how
many lines of text must be kept together at all times. You can also change the width of a text box,
and that's going to force the text to rewrap. In other words, you're going to change the way that the
text is laid out on the page, and that can fix your bad break issues. You can also change the height of
a text box. You can make a text box just a little bit shorter or even a little bit taller, and that's also
going to force your text to rewrap on the page, and that can fix your bad breaks. If you have a lot of
headings or subheadings in your document, just by tweaking the amount of vertical spacing that's
surrounding these headings can be enough of a change. You can either add a little bit of space or
maybe delete a little bit of space. That can make enough of a difference that you can fix your bad
break issues that way often. If you have any photographs or images or even a pull-quote, maybe a
chart or a graph that goes with your content, just by adding an element like that to your page, you're
going to force the text to rewrap. You're going to force your text to reflow in your document, and
that can be a way that you can fix your bad breaks. Let's summarize. Bad paragraph breaks disrupt
the flow of your documents. By avoiding bad paragraph breaks, you're making your documents look
more professional, and you're making them more legible and more user-friendly. That's Law 12,
Avoid Bad Paragraph Breaks.

13 Avoid line-breaking hyphens

- Law 13. Avoid line-breaking hyphens. Hyphens are useful little bits of punctuation. And sometimes
they're necessary to improve readability and help clarify meaning in your documents. There are
some words like the word twenty-two that require a hyphen. And here the hyphen's being used to
eliminate confusion and to help your readers get a quick grasp on exactly what the text is trying to
say. But using hyphens to line break words is not necessary and should be avoided. So what does
that mean? What are line-breaking hyphens? Line-breaking hyphens are hyphens that are
automatically added by the software that you're using. These hyphens are automatically inserted
when an entire word won't fit at the end of a line of text. The software is going to put the beginning
of the word on the line, maybe a few characters, then the software adds a hyphen and then the
software continues the rest of the word on the next line of the paragraph. And I'm sure you've seen
these a lot, you probably see them all the time. But here's an example of a paragraph that contains
line-breaking hyphens. Hyphens that are used as line breaks are visually unappealing and noisy. They
also break the readers' concentration and reading rhythm. You're asking readers to rebuild words in
their mind when these words are being split across multiple lines of text. So in short, line-breaking
hyphens are ugly and disruptive and should be avoided. So, here's that same paragraph, the same
text we had before and this time the hyphenation has been turned off. And notice how much cleaner
this second example is. The paragraph looks so much nicer. It's also easier to read because words are
not being broken across multiple lines of text. There may be times when for some reason you have
to use hyphens to line break words and if that's the case, make sure you use them correctly so that
they stay out of the way and are as unobtrusive as possible. Don't ever hyphenate titles, subheads or
proper names. Don't allow more than two hyphens consecutively in a paragraph. We can probably
best see this through an example. So here's an example that contains more than two hyphens
consecutively. You can see that this paragraph is pretty visually cluttered and pretty noisy with all of
these hyphens. Don't hyphernate URLs or email addresses. When hyphens appear in these special
bits of text you're changing the meaning of the text and introducing errors. Don't allow your
software to make all the hyphenation decisions. Modern desktop publishing software has built-in
hyphenation control. And you need to become familiar with where those controls are in the
software that you use. These hyphenation controls are where you can turn off hyphens completely.
If you have to use hyphens for some reason, this is also where you can specify the number of
consecutive hyphens that can appear in a paragraph. You can even tell the software how many
letters should appear before and after hyphens by giving it a minimum. If you're a web designer you
can use css code to turn off automatic hyphenation on your webpages. Let's summarize. Line-
breaking hyphens are visually unattractive and disrupt the flow of a sentence. For these reasons they
should be avoided. That's law 13, avoid line-breaking hyphens.

14 Signal new paragraphs once, not twice

- Law 14, Signal New Paragraphs Once, Not Twice. You're probably aware that a paragraph is a
collection of sentences that all relate to one topic. Multi-page documents are broken into
paragraphs to chunk the content and make it easier for your readers to digest. Using paragraphs also
helps break up really large blocks of text, it makes your documents more visibly interesting, and
keeps them from looking like big gray blocks on a page. So it's important that you give your readers
visual cues or signals when one paragraph is ending and a new paragraph is beginning. And you can
signal new paragraphs in a couple of ways. You can indent the first line of a new paragraph, or you
can add some vertical space on top of the new paragraph. You want to choose one or the other,
don't use both these signals at the same time. Indenting the first line of a new paragraph and adding
white space on top of it is redundant. You're oversignaling to your readers and your creating
awkward, distracting white space in your documents. So here's an example of a page with a few
paragraphs on it. Notice that each new paragraph is indented and that there's also white space
above each new paragraph. And here's the same text this time just with indents that are being used
to signal each new paragraph. And here again is the same text this time with vertical white space
added at the top of each paragraph to signal a new paragraph. Compare all three of these examples
and notice how clunky this first example looks. It's just too much, you told me your're going to start
a new paragraph and then you told me again, I got it. You don't have to tell me twice. The white
space that you're creating by this vertical gap plus the indent is awkward. It's a little distracting, it's a
weird shape. The second two examples show how to correctly signal new paragraphs. These pages
look much more organized, they're neater, they're more professional, overall the page design and
the white space is less distracting. This problem happens quite a bit with paragraphs at the start of a
new chapter or at the start of a document. Here's an example of a paragraph at the start of a new
chapter and you can see here the paragraph is indented. And here's the same page this time without
the indent. The second page looks much better. In the first there's too much extra unnecessary,
awkwardly shaped white space. As a reader I already know you're starting a new paragraph, you told
me that when you put the chapter title at the top of the page and when you added some space
below that title. You don't need to tell me again. If you're going to use an indent to signal a new
paragraph, don't hit the space bar to create the indent. The best way to create an indent is to use a
first line indent in your software. How big should a paragraph indent be? A paragraph indent should
be about one to two times as wide as they type size that you're using. This is going to give you an
indent that's easily seen but not so big that it looks awkward. If you're using 11 point body text the
correct paragraph indent would be 11 to 22 points wide. Now if you're going to add vertical white
space instead to signal a new paragraph, don't create this space by hitting the return key twice, this
results in a space that is unnecessarily large. You want to use either the space before or the space
after settings in your paragraph settings to set the exact amount of space that you want. So what is
that, how big should this space be? A vertical space equal to about 50 to 80 percent of the body text
is the best size. If you're using 10 point body text that means that the vertical space between
paragraphs should be five to eight points tall. Let's summarize. When you want to signal the start of
a new paragraph remember that you only need to use one signal. Use either a first line indent or a
vertical space, not both. If a paragraph is at the beginning of a document or at the beginning of a
new chapter there's no need to use an indent or add extra white space, the chapter title or the sub-
heading is the signal. That's law 14. Signal New Paragraphs Once, Not Twice.

15 Break up large blocks of text

- Law 15: Break up large blocks of text. Assuming you're creating a document that is meant to be
read, it's important that you make the text look inviting and legible. It's the author and the editor's
job to make sure that the text is interesing, that it's age-appropriate, and all of those other really
important things. But as a designer, it's your job to visually invite the reader into the page, and then
keep their interest throughout the document. Single color text on a single color background,
repeated page after page, is a sure-fire way to create a boring looking document. No matter how
well written the text is, many people won't even give content a chance if the document looks boring
and if the amount of text appears to be overwhelming. Here's a page that's full of black text on a
white background. Imagine reading a 25-page document that looked like this, page after page. The
black text and the white background start to blur together and they create a big, gray, heavy,
uninviting block on this page. Here's the same text, and this time, it's been broken up with some
typographic embellishments. The dull grayness of this page is gone. The page is much more inviting.
It's also much more aesthetically pleasing. Our first example over here looks like a bunch of text was
just dumped on the page without a whole lot of thought. But in our second example, it looks like
some thought actually went into making this document look inviting. This page looks like it was
designed. There are a lot of different ways that you can break up large blocks of text, so let's talk
about a few of them. Drop caps or large initial caps. A drop cap is a large capital letter that drops
down into the body of the text. A large initial cap is an initial character that's been set at a much
larger size than the rest of the body text or the text on the page. This initial cap shares the same
baseline as the rest of the text. Rules. Rules can be professional, really simple ways to enhance a
page. Try adding rules to headers and footers, or even to some of the headings and titles on your
page to help break up that text. Pull quotes. Pull quotes are short passages that have been pulled
out of the document's text and highlighted. Pull quotes work really well if there's a sentence or a
quote that really sums up the point of the text on a page. White space. Adding larger margins to
your pages is going to give the body text, or the text on the page, extra breathing room. And that's
going to help lighten up the feel of the page and get rid of that heavy, blocky feeling. Graphics.
Photos, illustrations, maybe charts, graphs, are a great way to break up text on a page. Images can
be a wonderful way to add some pizzazz to a layout. But keep in mind that they're not required. If
you don't have access to any great images that work with your content, or maybe if your content
doesn't lend itself to any of these types of graphics, that's okay. Keep in mind that all the examples
we've looked at so far have achieved our objective of breaking up the page and making our
documents more aesthetically pleasing. They've achieved that objective without the use of any
photos or any illustrations. These graphics are great; they're a great thing to use. But they're not
required. The point is to add enough enhancements to break up the text in your documents and
then stop. Don't add any more than what's needed. You don't want to create a document that is full
of page junk. Here's an example where that's exactly what happened. This page is over-embellished.
The page has become crowded. It feels amateurish. There's so much going on, it's hard to know
where to look first. It's hard for our reader to know where to devote their attention, where to start
on the page. Overall, the result is disjointed and pretty frantic. Knowing when to stop is a really
important part of typography and page design. Let's summarize. If you're working on a text-heavy
multi-page document, it's especially important to break up the text and make the document more
inviting and less intimidating. This also makes your documents more visually pleasing and less
boring. That's law 15: Break up large blocks of text.

16 Emphasize ten percent or less of text

- Law 16: Emphasize 10 percent or less of text. There will be occasions when you need to emphasize
some text, to call attention to it. Emphasizing text is a great way to add visual interest to your
documents and break up large gray text blocks. Emphasis also helps signal to readers that certain
words require extra attention. But you want to be careful. You don't want to emphasize too much
text on a page because then you've basically emphasized nothing. Emphasis should be limited so
that, when it is used, it does what it's meant to do, which is call attention. You should emphasize 10
percent or less of visible text on a page. This means that, for every 10 words, only one word should
be emphasized. Any more than that, and you risk over-emphasizing. In these first couple of
examples, we'll look at emphasizing body text. In this first example, notice how most of the text in
this paragraph is bold. Bold text is a great way to emphasize text, but this is too much. So much text
here is bold that the bold loses its impact. Now, in this second example, you can see that only a few
key words are emphasized. Notice how those few words really jump off the page and call your
attention. Here, the bold text is doing its job. It's emphasizing the key words without overdoing it.
Now let's look at an example using a business card. In this first card, all the text on the card is big and
attention-grabbing. Now, the problem is that because all of the text is basically the same size,
nothing really stands out, even though it's all big text. In this example, you can see that certain
elements on this card have been emphasized using different text sizes. Here, the person's name is
the largest item on the card. That helps emphasize it. It helps the name stand out. Then the job title
is the next-largest size text on the card, and then contact information is the smallest text on the
card. On this poster, here we're emphasizing text using color. We've decided to use red as our
highlight color. Because so much of the text is red, the red text is not functioning as a highlight. If the
goal was to use the color red to highlight text, this design is not achieving it. In the second example,
just a few bits of text have been colored red, and that helps them jump off the page. The red
highlights are now serving their purpose and they're emphasizing important information. Let's
summarize. When you're creating a document, pay attention to any words or phrases that are
particularly important to the document's message. It's a great idea to emphasize this text and really
help it stand out. This signals to readers that emphasized text is especially important. But you want
to be careful and not over-emphasize. By emphasizing everything on a page, emphasis becomes the
norm and nothing stands out. Nothing looks more important than anything else, and therefore,
nothing is emphasized. That's law 16. Emphasize 10 percent or less of text.

17 Avoid all caps and underlined text

- Law 17, avoid all caps and underlined text. On a typewriter, there are really two ways to emphasize
text and help call attention to it. All caps and underlines. That's fine if you're using a typewriter but if
you're not, and you're probably not, it's time to abandon those bad habits and learn better ways,
more modern ways to emphasize text. In body text, text set in all caps is very clunky and very heavy
on the page. All caps letters look huge and they overwhelm the text that surrounds them. If you're
going to use all caps, limit their use to titles and sub-heads in text-heavy documents. This will ensure
that they're used sparingly. For other documents like posters or invitations and business cards, it can
be easier to incorporate text in all caps without it being so visually disruptive. Underlines are a
typewriter convention that told typesetters to set the underlined text in italics. Professionally
typeset documents do not use underlines. If you want to add horizontal lines to headings or in pages
headers or footers, use rules. You have much more control over rules and you can style them to
visually fit in your document. The built-in underline formatting style should never be used, period.
On a computer, with desktop publishing software, we have many, many more options to emphasize
text and all of these options are more professional, they're more visually pleasing, and they're the
right way to emphasize text so let's look at some of those. Bold. Using bold text is a great way to
emphasize text and help it stand out. Italics. Italicized text is also a great emphasis technique. Italic
text is more visually subtle than bold text and it can be a nice way to add some emphasis in a quiet,
subdued way. Be aware that some words need to be set italic in order to be correct. These include
things like the names of books, the names of magazines, movies, TV shows, works of art, albums,
planes, ships and trains. There are other words that also need to be italicized as well. It's great to be
familiar with these rules and apply them in your documents. Small caps. Small caps can be a great
way to use capital letters for emphasis, without all that extra visual weight, that all caps contain.
Small caps are uppercase letters that are as tall as a lowercase x in a given typeface. Using a different
typeface. If you're using a different typeface for emphasis, make sure it's different enough from the
rest of your text to stand out. If you're using this technique in body text, align x heights of both
typefaces to help integrate them and make them look cohesive on the page. Spacing. Adding extra
space around a block of text can be a very effective, unexpected way to emphasize a word or a
phrase. This technique doesn't work so well in body text but it can be very effective on business
cards, posters, invitations and documents of that type. Size. Changing the size of a chunk of text and
making it really big or really small can effectively call attention to it. This is another technique that
really doesn't always work so well in body text but it can be very effective in other types of
documents. Color. Adding color is a great way to emphasize text. But make sure that the emphasis
color you choose is different enough from your text color to stand out. Make sure it's also still
providing enough contrast with your background to make it legible. Be aware, that color vision
deficiency will affect people's ability to see colors in your documents. It's estimated that about eight
percent of men and point five percent of women experience the most common form of this
deficiency, which is red-green color vision deficiency. So if you use color as an emphasis technique in
a document, make sure that the emphasis is not critical to understanding the content. If it is, you
should choose a different emphasis technique. It's best to pick one of these techniques and stick
with it throughout the document. Here's an example of a couple of paragraphs where the emphasis
technique switches throughout. This makes the text look pretty jumbled, it's visually confusing and
overall, jarring. Now, here's the same text where we chose to use only bold as our emphasis
technique. The effect is much more professional and overall, the page looks a lot less jumbled. Also
be careful that you're not over-signaling. You only really need to use one of these techniques at a
time. Here's an example of emphasized text that uses three of the emphasis techniques we just
talked about. It's too much and it's unnecessary. We emphasized, then emphasized again and then
we emphasized again. Using one emphasis technique at a time is more professional and helps the
text to stand out without over-doing it. Let's summarize. There will be times when you want to
emphasize some text in a document to make it stand out and draw a reader's attention. There are
many, many ways to do this effectively using a computer and desktop publishing software. You want
to avoid using underlines and all caps to indicate emphasis. This will help your documents look more
professional, more modern, and more visually pleasing. That's law 17. Avoid all caps and underlined
text.

18 Set acronyms and initialisms in small caps

- Law 18, Set Acronyms and Initialisms in Small Caps. Acronyms are abbreviations formed from the
initial letters of other words, and acronyms are pronounced as words. Initialisms are also
abbreviations that are formed from the initial letters of other words, but initialisms are not
pronounced as words. They're pronounced as separate letters. Examples of acronyms are NASA,
which stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ASCII, which stands for American
Standard Code for Information Interchange, NATO, which stands for North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, and ASAP which stands for as soon as possible. And you can see we took the first letter
of each of these words and strung it together to form an abbreviation which we pronounce as a
word. Examples of initialisms are CIA, which stands for Central Intelligence Agency, and here, instead
of reading CIA as a word, we pronounce each separate letter, and that's what makes this an
initialism. FBI, which stands for Federal Bureau of Investigation, AM, which stands for ante
meridiem, and PM, which stands for post meridiem. In body text, you'll often see acronyms and
initialisms set in all caps or all upper case letters, and usually they look like this, and notice how
these abbreviations that are set in all caps overpower the other body text on the page. These
abbreviations look so huge and a little bit out of place. So, you should avoid using all caps in
professional documents for this reason. Text that is set in all caps is really too heavy on the page,
and it looks out of scale compared to the rest of the body text that's going to be set in mostly lower
case letters. So then, what do you do with acronyms and initialisms? What is the proper way to treat
these things typographically? You should set them using small caps, and what are small caps? Small
caps are upper case characters that are drawn at a lower case scale. Small cap characters are about
the same height as a typeface's x-height, but they're capital letters. Here's an example of the same
body text as before, but this time our abbreviations, our acronyms and our initialisms, have been set
in small caps, rather than in all caps, like they were before, and notice how in our second example
these abbreviations look so much nicer, and they really integrate better with the rest of the body
text on the page and in the paragraph. Acronyms and initialisms also look best with some letter
spacing or a little extra space added between each letter. Here's an example of the same text from
earlier, that contains our abbreviations, and now they're set in small caps, and we've also added just
a little bit of letter spacing, or a little bit of horizontal space between each letter. Although acronyms
and initialisms are abbreviations, they do not need periods included after each letter. Including these
periods adds unnecessary visual clutter to the abbreviations, and your pages are going to look a lot
cleaner without all that extra punctuation. The meaning is still clear. Readability is not sacrificed
without this extra punctuation. If you're going to be using a lot of small caps in your document, you
want to choose a type family that includes a small caps typeface. Small caps typefaces have been
specifically created and drawn to visually integrate with other text on your page and to look really
good while doing it. Let's summarize. Pay attention to acronyms and initialisms in your documents.
You should set them using small caps. Properly typesetting these abbreviations will go a long way
toward making your pages look professional and aesthetically pleasing. That's Law 18, Set Acronyms
and initialisms in Small Caps.

19 Hang punctuation in small chunks of text

- Law 19: Hang punctuation in small chunks of text. When you have a small chunk of text that
contains punctuation marks, the punctuation marks should be hung off of the aligned edge. What
does that mean? Hanging punctuation may be a new phrase that you've never heard before. Let's
look at a few examples to explain the concept. In this first example, we've got a page from a
document, and we're featuring a pull quote on this page. The pull quote is helping us break up some
of the text on the page and add some visual interest. Notice how the opening quotation marks have
been left-aligned with the rest of the text. In this example, the punctuation is not hung. In the
second example, we've got the same text, but now the punctuation has been hung. Do you see how
the opening quotation mark is actually hung outside of the main text block? See how it's been
scooted to the left just a bit? Looking at both of these examples, notice how the first line in this
example appears to be indented just a bit. This visual effect is being caused by the amount of white
space that's below the opening quotation mark. The text is mathematically aligned. Everything is
aligned left here. But it doesn't look aligned. So it's not correct. It's not correctly aligned and needs
to be fixed. We can fix this issue by hanging the quotation mark, just like in the second example. By
moving the quotation mark just outside of the main text block like we did here, scooting it to the
left, we've created a clean, hard edge with our text. The left edge is strong and aligned. The
punctuation is hung, and the pull quote now looks correct. Here's another example. This time, we
have some text on a poster. This text has been right-aligned. You'll notice it's a sentence and there's
a period at the end of the sentence. Now, the text is mathematically right-aligned. There's an
imaginary vertical line here and everything's lined up against it. But notice how the period makes it
look like the very last line is indented a bit. Because a period is such a small character with so much
white space on top, the period is taking a visual chunk out of our nice, clean right edge. Here's the
same text. It's still right-aligned, still have the period. But now the ending period has been hung off
of the right edge. Our strong right text edge is preserved. And now the alignment looks correct. This
law applies to small chunks of text that have been separated out from body text in long documents.
This may be text like quotations, maybe headlines. This law also applies to text on posters, business
cards, invitations, and any other single page documents that don't contain large amounts of body
text. In body text, punctuation is usually not hung. That's because body text is small enough that the
visual interruption caused by punctuation is pretty minimal. So you don't have to worry about
hanging punctuation in body text. Let's summarize. When you're working with small chunks of text,
punctuation should be hung in order to preserve proper visual alignment. Hanging punctuation
means moving punctuation marks outside of the text block so that the punctuation does not
interfere with the text alignment. This attention to detail will create strong, visually correct text
alignments in your documents, and it's really going to take your documents to the next level
professionally. That's law 19. Hang punctuation in small chunks of text.
20 Hang bullets and numbers in lists

- Law 20: Hang bullets and numbers in lists. Using bulleted or numbered lists is a great way to break
up paragraphs of text and present information in an organized, chunked, way. That's going to help
readers digest it and better understand the information. Numbered lists should be used when you're
presenting a list of steps, or items in some kind of a sequence where the order of the items is
important. Bulleted lists should be used when you're presenting a list of information and order's not
important at all. Whether you're using bulleted lists or numbered lists, you should hang the bullets
or numbers to preserve and create a strong aligned edge for the data in your lists. What does it
mean to hang bullets and numbers? Well, let's look at some examples to help explain the concept. In
this first example, we have a bulleted list. We've got some information here. But the bullets have not
been hung. In the second example, we have the exact same list, but the difference here is that the
bullets have been hung. You can see that each bullet is actually set outside of the main text block.
The bullets have actually been scooted out to the left. Looking at the first example, do you see how
the first line of each bulleted item actually appears to be indented? It's not, but this visual effect is
being caused by the amount of space that's surrounding each bullet. The text block is
mathematically aligned. It's aligned to the left. But the text does not look aligned, and therefore, it
doesn't look right. The effect here is that the left edge looks ragged and disorganized. But now, in
the second example, we've actually hung the bullets and by doing this, we've created a clean, hard
left edge for our text. The left edge is strong and aligned. It looks professional and it looks correct.
Let's move on to numbered lists. Here's a numbered list, and the numbers have not been hung.
Here's the same list, but this time, the numbers are properly hung off the left edge. What a
difference. A strong left alignment is now being created because we've moved the numbers outside
of the text block and that allows the text to be properly visually left-aligned. It's also important to
understand how to correctly align numbers in a numbered list. Numbers should always be aligned on
the decimal point, even if that decimal point is implied and not visible. Now, this becomes really
important when you have lists of information that contain single digits, double digits, and maybe
even triple digit numbers. Here's an example of a numbered list that contains 12 items. The numbers
have been properly hung off the left edge, just like we talked about earlier. But the numbers are not
properly aligned. Now, in this example, same list with the same list items, the numbers have also
been hung off the left edge, but now the numbers are properly aligned. They're aligned on the
decimal point. The numbers here create a strong right-edge alignment, and the text creates a strong
left-edge alignment. And now, the text and the numbers in this list are all correctly aligned and look
great. You might be thinking, "Well, but those numbers "don't have decimal points." And it's true
that there are no visible decimal points here. But remember, there are always implied invisible
decimal points after all whole numbers, and that's what you want to align on. Now, learning how to
use tabs in your desktop publishing software is going to make your life a lot easier when it comes to
properly formatting lists of information. You want to learn how to properly use all the different tabs
in your software, and that means using left-aligned tabs, right-aligned tabs, center-aligned tabs, and
decimal-aligned tabs. They all exist, and if you take the time and learn how to use them properly,
you'll be so glad you did, and you're going to save yourself a lot of time and a lot of headaches. Let's
summarize. Whenever you're setting bulleted and numbered lists, make sure that your text
alignments are visually strong and intact. Bullets should be aligned with bullets. Numbers should be
aligned with numbers. And text should be aligned with text. Numbers should always be aligned on
their decimal points, even if these decimal points are not visible. Remember, they're still there.
Hanging the bullets and numbers in your lists provides proper visual alignment for your text. This
attention to detail is going to take your documents to the next level professionally and they're going
to look great. That's law 20: Hang bullets and numbers in lists.
21 Avoid bad line breaks

- Law 21: Avoid Bad Line Breaks. A line break is the place in a paragraph where text breaks off at the
end of one line and then continues again on the next line of the paragraph. And there are Two
Different Types of Bad Line Breaks. Bad Visual Breaks and Bad Contextual Breaks. Bad Visual Breaks
are line breaks that Visually Disrupt the Flow of Your Text. Here's an example of a small chunk of text
that has some Bad Visual Breaks and here's an example of the same text, but now the breaks have
been fixed and our paragraph looks a lot neater and a lot cleaner. If you are using flush left text, like
we are here in our examples, you want to make sure and pay attention to the right edge of your text
block. This first block of text here is an example of what is called a Bad Rag, or a Bad Ragged Edge.
And you can see over here on this right side the jagged dynamic shape that's being created in the
white space of this right margin. This is pretty Distracting and should be avoided. Looking at the
second sample block of text, notice how the Bad Rag has been fixed. And we did this by making the
entire text block just a little bit narrower. This one small adjustment made a huge positive difference
in the way that this text looks on the page. Now the right edge is much less jagged and as a result
the white space over here is a lot less distracting. This isn't an issue that's just limited to flush left
text. You can also end up with Bad Breaks in Flush Right Text and also with Centered Text. So watch
out for Bad Visual Line Breaks. They Make your Documents Look Less Professional, and they're
Distracting to Readers. Now let's talk about Bad Contextual Breaks. Here's an example of a Bad
Contextual Break in a headline and here's the same headline, but this time that break has been fixed.
In the first block of text, notice how the Line Break is splitting up words that really belong together in
the same phrase and should appear on the same line. If you're reading this headline, this Bad Break
might cause you to go back and reread it, just to make sure you understood its meaning. Any time
that your layout forces readers to go back and reread something, this is a red flag that
improvements need to be made. Now when the break is fixed reading the text is so much easier and
that's because we've minimized that distraction of the Bad Contextual Break. You also want to watch
your Line Breaks when you're dealing with URLs and Email Addresses. It's really important that these
special strings of text appear on the same line with no breaks, whenever possible. And this can be a
little tricky because URLs and Email Addresses tend to get long, some of them, but it's important
because we want to make these special strings of text as readable and as useful as possible. So how
can you fix bad line breaks? Editing or rewriting the text is sometimes the best and the easiest way
to fix these issues. If you can add, delete, or maybe modify a few words sometimes you can take care
of the bad break problem. You may not always be able to edit the text in the document you're
working on and if that's not an option, there are still a couple other ways that you can correct bad
breaks. You can Change the Width of the Text Block, make it a little bit wider, or a little bit narrower.
You can also Change the Size of the Text. Often a very small, tiny change will make enough of a
difference to fix the issues that you're having with bad breaks. Let's summarize, Watch for Bad Line
Breaks in Small Chunks of Text. Fixing these Bad Line Breaks will Make Your Text Easier to Read, and
Makes Your Documents Look More Professional. That's Law 21: Avoid Bad Line Breaks.

22 Use symbols and special characters as needed

- Law 22: Use symbols and special characters as needed. There will be times when you need to
include symbols and characters in your documents, that can't be found on your standard keyboard.
These characters include things like special punctuation marks, registered trademark symbols,
copyright symbols, degree symbols, accented characters, and so on. It can be really tempting to be a
little lazy and not include these special characters in your documents, but they are not hard to use
and should be included when needed. This is especially true of what are called diacritical marks and
diacritical marks are symbols added to letters of the alphabet that indicate a different pronunciation.
Accent marks are a type of diacritical mark that you're probably familiar with. You can see on screen,
some other examples of diacritical marks. Now the English language does not contain many native
words that use diacritical marks, but many, many other languages, including French, Italian, German,
Spanish, and others, they do use a lot of diacritical marks. The English language contains words that
have been borrowed from some of these languages, that also require these diacritical marks. If a
word needs a diacritical mark to be spelled correctly, use it. For example, in Spanish, the word si
without an accent mark over the i, is not the same as the word si with an accent mark over the i. This
first word translates to if in English. The second word with the accent mark translates to yes. So you
can see, it's really important to get these marks correct. You could actually change the meaning of
words by misusing or not including diacritical marks. This is especially important when you're dealing
with people's names. Leaving off or misusing a necessary diacritical mark is like misspelling a
person's name. You do not want to do that in your documents. Symbols include things like degree
symbols, mathematical symbols, monetary symbols, and so on. Depending on the type of documents
that you create and the content that you're working with, you may frequently need to use some of
these symbols, and so it's really important that you know how to do that and how to access these
symbols. There are a lot of different ways that you could access these symbols and accented
characters on a computer. If you use certain symbols and characters often enough, you'll memorize
how to create them really quickly. For the special characters that you haven't memorized, learn how
to access special characters in your operating system, and in the software package that you're using.
Here are a few tips to help you get started. On Macintosh computers, a really easy way to insert
diacritical marks is to put your cursor in your document and hold down a letter on the keyboard. Any
diacritical marks that exist for that letter will appear and you simply select the one you want. This
works in email and it works in text messages on iPhones. Further special characters on a Macintosh
computer, you could use what's called the character viewer or the keyboard viewer. If you use a
computer with the Windows operating system, look for what's called the character map or the
international keyboard utility. For web designers, to make special characters and accented letters
show up on your web pages, you're going to use a special set of codes that are called character
entities. You'll insert these character entities into your HTML code and then a web browser is going
to display the corresponding symbols or characters that you coded. You could do an online search
for character entities and you will get plenty of information that gives you all of these special codes
to use in your web pages. Keep in mind that not all typefaces include these special characters. The
typeface designer has to create these characters and include them in the typeface. Even though
there are many, many websites out there where you can download free typefaces, many of these
freebies do not include symbols and special characters. If you're creating a document and you know
you're going to need the use of special characters, before you pick a typeface, before you decide on
the final typeface, make sure that the typefaces you're looking at contain the special characters that
you need. Let's summarize. When you're typesetting and designing documents, be aware that the
text may require the use of symbols and special characters that don't appear on a standard
keyboard. Don't be lazy and just ignore these special characters, they're not hard to include. Learn
how to access the special characters in the software and operating system that you're using. If a
word contains a special character, then it needs that character to be spelled correctly. That's Law 22:
Use symbols and special characters as needed.

23 Use proportional old-style figures in body text

- Law 23: Use proportional oldstyle figures in body text. You may not be aware of this, but some
typefaces contain different types of figures that have been designed for different uses. Figures is just
another word for numbers. Proportional figures have been designed to consume different amounts
of space based on the shape of each number. In proportional figures, the number one takes up less
space than the number eight. Proportional figures work well within lines of mixed-case text, like
body text. Another type of figures are tabular figures. Tabular figures are numbers that have been
created to take up the same amount of horizontal and vertical space. A number one takes up exactly
the same amount of space as a number eight, and every other number. Because of this, tabular
figures are great for creating tables of text because they stay aligned with each other. Tabular figures
are the numbers that you get automatically when you start typing numbers in a document. Within
each of these divisions, there are two more types of figures, oldstyle figures and lining figures.
Oldstyle figures have varying shapes and positions for each number. Some of these numbers even
have ascenders and some have descenders. Lining figures all sit on the same baseline, and all lining
figures have the same height, which is usually equal to the height of a capital letter. This all may be a
little confusing. Let's look at some examples to try and clear this up. Tabular lining figures should be
used in tables of data because the numbers will automatically align both vertically and horizontally.
But tabular lining figures should not be used in strings of text, like body text. They do not integrate
well visually. Tabular oldstyle figures are numbers that have fixed widths, but they have the varying
heights of oldstyle figures. Now, tabular oldstyle figures are best used when you're dealing with
tabular data that could use a little sprucing up, or would benefit from being a little more fancy-
looking. Examples would include things like, if you're making table of contents, if you're creating lists
of phone numbers on a business card or maybe letterhead. But tabular oldstyle figures should not be
used in strings of text, like body text. They don't integrate well visually. Proportional lining figures
should be used for numbers that appear in strings of uppercase text, like headlines, because the
proportional spacing helps them visually integrate with the text and their height is usually just about
even with the uppercase letters. Proportional lining figures should not be used in blocks of mixed-
case text, like body text. They're too tall. And these proportional lining figures tend to overwhelm
the lowercase letters that you see in body text. The last type of figures that we're going to talk about
are proportional oldstyle figures. These are the figures that should be used in blocks of mixed-case
text, like body text. Because of their size and varying heights, they integrate really well with
surrounding lowercase letters and they don't call too much attention to themselves, becoming a
distraction. All of these special figures can be found in what are called open type typefaces. But you
cannot access these figures using just your keyboard. Accessing these special figures can be done in
a couple different ways, depending on the software you're using. If you're a web designer, you can
use the font variant tag in your CSS to access these different types of figures. You need to be aware
that not all typefaces are going to include these special figures. The type designer, whoever designed
the typeface, had to have designed and included these figures when they created the typeface.
You're also going to need to choose an open type typeface in order to have access to these figures. If
you know that you are going to be creating a document that contains a lot of figures or a lot of
numbers, it's a great idea to choose a typeface upfront that will include these varied numerals. Let's
summarize. Using the proper figures in your text is a great way to take your documents to the next
level professionally. Learn which types of figures should be used when, and learn how to access
these figures in the software that you're using. Paying attention to details like this will help make
your text more readable, and it also adds a certain level of sophistication and elegance to your
documents. That's law 23. Use proportional oldstyle figures in body text.

23 Use proportional old-style figures in body text

- Law 23: Use proportional oldstyle figures in body text. You may not be aware of this, but some
typefaces contain different types of figures that have been designed for different uses. Figures is just
another word for numbers. Proportional figures have been designed to consume different amounts
of space based on the shape of each number. In proportional figures, the number one takes up less
space than the number eight. Proportional figures work well within lines of mixed-case text, like
body text. Another type of figures are tabular figures. Tabular figures are numbers that have been
created to take up the same amount of horizontal and vertical space. A number one takes up exactly
the same amount of space as a number eight, and every other number. Because of this, tabular
figures are great for creating tables of text because they stay aligned with each other. Tabular figures
are the numbers that you get automatically when you start typing numbers in a document. Within
each of these divisions, there are two more types of figures, oldstyle figures and lining figures.
Oldstyle figures have varying shapes and positions for each number. Some of these numbers even
have ascenders and some have descenders. Lining figures all sit on the same baseline, and all lining
figures have the same height, which is usually equal to the height of a capital letter. This all may be a
little confusing. Let's look at some examples to try and clear this up. Tabular lining figures should be
used in tables of data because the numbers will automatically align both vertically and horizontally.
But tabular lining figures should not be used in strings of text, like body text. They do not integrate
well visually. Tabular oldstyle figures are numbers that have fixed widths, but they have the varying
heights of oldstyle figures. Now, tabular oldstyle figures are best used when you're dealing with
tabular data that could use a little sprucing up, or would benefit from being a little more fancy-
looking. Examples would include things like, if you're making table of contents, if you're creating lists
of phone numbers on a business card or maybe letterhead. But tabular oldstyle figures should not be
used in strings of text, like body text. They don't integrate well visually. Proportional lining figures
should be used for numbers that appear in strings of uppercase text, like headlines, because the
proportional spacing helps them visually integrate with the text and their height is usually just about
even with the uppercase letters. Proportional lining figures should not be used in blocks of mixed-
case text, like body text. They're too tall. And these proportional lining figures tend to overwhelm
the lowercase letters that you see in body text. The last type of figures that we're going to talk about
are proportional oldstyle figures. These are the figures that should be used in blocks of mixed-case
text, like body text. Because of their size and varying heights, they integrate really well with
surrounding lowercase letters and they don't call too much attention to themselves, becoming a
distraction. All of these special figures can be found in what are called open type typefaces. But you
cannot access these figures using just your keyboard. Accessing these special figures can be done in
a couple different ways, depending on the software you're using. If you're a web designer, you can
use the font variant tag in your CSS to access these different types of figures. You need to be aware
that not all typefaces are going to include these special figures. The type designer, whoever designed
the typeface, had to have designed and included these figures when they created the typeface.
You're also going to need to choose an open type typeface in order to have access to these figures. If
you know that you are going to be creating a document that contains a lot of figures or a lot of
numbers, it's a great idea to choose a typeface upfront that will include these varied numerals. Let's
summarize. Using the proper figures in your text is a great way to take your documents to the next
level professionally. Learn which types of figures should be used when, and learn how to access
these figures in the software that you're using. Paying attention to details like this will help make
your text more readable, and it also adds a certain level of sophistication and elegance to your
documents. That's law 23. Use proportional oldstyle figures in body text.

25 Verify software alignments optically

- Law 25, verify software alignments optically. When you're designing documents, you're often going
to want to align objects on a page. So for example, you might want to center text or images on a
page. And, there may be times when you want to align objects to each other. The problem is that
while your software can mathematically align these objects, right now the software is not smart
enough to know if these alignments look correct. Sometimes the alignments that your software is
doing, the mathematical alignments, are just fine. And other times they're not, and they need
manual adjustments. They need a little bit of human intervention. It all depends on the objects
you're aligning and what they look like. Here's a logo that was designed for a non-profit group in
Houston, TX. And, whenever I want to horizontally center this logo on a page, I have to be really
careful because, you can see in this example, the logo is mathematically, horizontally centered on
the page, but it does not look centered. It looks like it's just a little too far to the left, and it actually
looks like it might tip over just a little bit. Why? Because the sun rays are visually lighter than the rest
of the logo, which means that the left side of this logo is visually heavier than the right side. When
I'm centering this logo on a page, it needs to be centered using just the text, not including the sun
rays. So, let's take a look and see what that does. In this example, I have compensated for this
alignment issue, and I've moved the logo a bit to the right. You'll notice now it looks correctly
horizontally centered. And there's no way that your software program can do this, at least not yet.
This is the kind of thing that you really have to see with your eyes, and then go in and manually fix it.
Another issue to watch out for when you're dealing with alignments are ascenders and descenders,
especially when you're vertically centering text on a page. If you're using a typeface with extreme
proportions and large ascenders and descenders, this becomes even more important. So here's
some sample text on a business card. And this text is mathematically centered on the card both
horizontally and vertically by the software. But, it doesn't look quite right, it doesn't look centered.
Why? Because, the word's that we're using, have descenders but no ascenders. So, horizontally this
looks just fine, but vertically it looks too high on the page. The text looks like it's too high up. The
descenders of this typeface are pretty large and they're visually light. They're thin, they're a little
wispy, but our software doesn't know that. So, we need to manually move this text down on the
card, to make it look visually centered. There may also be times when you need to tweak horizontal
alignments in your text based on specific characters. Here's an example of some text that's left
aligned, and the first line starts with what's called a dropped cap. And a dropped cap is just a
dropped capital letter. It's used to add visual interest, maybe spice up the page a bit. And, in this
example, our drop cap, or the first letter, is the letter capital T. This text block is mathematically left
aligned including our drop cap, but visually it just doesn't look quite right. We've lost our nice hard
left edge. Now the second example, we've tweaked the alignment, and now the crossbar of the T,
hangs just outside of the text block. You can see it's been scooted to the left just a little bit. And, you
can see how that slight adjustment gives a lot more strength to this left edge of text. Our goal is left
horizontal alignment. If the text does not look properly aligned, if it doesn't look like it's left aligned,
then it's not correct and you need to fix it. Don't just rely on the software to make all of these
choices for you. Let's summarize, do not blindly trust software alignments. You might have done
everything right in the software, and the software may be doing its job and mathematically aligning
everything on your page. But you still need to use your eyes and judge alignments for yourself. Then,
you can make manual adjustments as needed. Always check objects that are supposed to be aligned
and make sure that they're optically aligned. Alignments need to look correct in order to be correct.
That's Law 25, verify software alignments optically.

26 Connect thoughts, using em dashes

- Law 26: Connect Thoughts Using Em Dashes What is an em dash? An em dash is the widest dash
character. On a typewriter, and even still on a standard keyboard on your computer, there is no em
dash character. So, typists would use double hyphens in order to stand in for an em dash, knowing
that the typesetter would go back and replace their double hyphens with an actual em dash. But
assuming that you're using a computer to create documents, you should not be using double
hyphens ever. There is no need. Double hyphens are not correct, and they make your documents
look unprofessional. If you find yourself wanting to use double hyphens, try inserting an em dash
instead. And if you see any double hyphens in documents that were created by someone else,
replace them with em dashes. So when should you use an em dash? Em dashes can be handy when
you don't want a comma, which would end the thought, but you aren't quite sure what punctuation
to use instead. Em dashes can replace commas, semicolons, colons and parentheses. Em dashes are
often used to indicate added emphasis. Em dashes can also be used to indicate long pauses, or
interruptions in text. Em dashes are also used to show abrupt changes of thought. You should not
add spaces around an em dash, but depending on the typeface that you're using, the size of the
typeface, and the characters surrounding the dash, you may need to add what are called thin spaces
on either side of an em dash, between the dash and the characters on either side. And a good rule of
thumb is that if the dash touches, or almost touches, any characters, then a thin space is needed.
And a thin space is just what it sounds like. It's a space that's really thin. It's actually about a fifth of
an em wide. And depending on the software you're using, you may be able to insert a thin space by
using a menu, but if that's not the case you can create your own thin spaces by typing a regular
space, and then selecting it and making that space smaller. So how can you create em dashes? Well,
em dashes are not characters that are included on a standard keyboard. So they're considered
special characters, and you're going to need to use a special menu, or a special key combination, in
order to insert an em dash into your documents. If you're using a Macintosh computer, you can
insert an em dash into your document by holding down the keys option and shift, and then typing a
hyphen. And if you're using a Windows machine, you can insert an em dash by holding down the alt
key, and then typing the numbers "0151". Now if you're a web designer in HTML, you would use this
character entity in order to insert an em dash. Let's summarize. Stop using double hyphens. They're
not correct and they make your documents look unprofessional. Instead, use an em dash when you
want to add emphasis to a word or phrase, to indicate a long pause or interruption, or to show
abrupt changes of thought. Em dashes are really easy to insert in your documents, and they will
make your documents more professional. That's Law 26: Connect Thoughts Using Em Dashes.

27 Show ranges, using en dashes

- Law 27. Show Ranges Using En Dashes. What is an en dash? An en dash is a dash that's larger than
an hyphen but smaller than an em dash. Now, many people aren't familiar with en dashes and when
to use them. When people use typewriters, the choices are really between using a hyphen or a
double hyphen. There's nothing in between, on a typewriter. But the en dash is that in-between
character and it does have important uses. What are those uses? And when should you use an en
dash? Well, most commonly, en dashes are used to show ranges of time, ranges of duration or
ranges of distance. So, for example, if you're talking about January through June, 2 o'clock to 5
o'clock, Monday through Friday, 2001 to 2003, pages 230 to 255 or the Florida-Texas Flight Path. In
all of those cases, we're talking about ranges and an en dash is the proper character to use. En
dashes are also used to join words when at least one word is an open compound. Open compounds
are usually two-word proper nouns. So, for example, if you're talking about the New York-New
Jersey Border or Puerto Rican-United States Agreement or the North Carolina-Virginia Border. You
can see, in all of those examples, we're joining words and phrases and at least one word is an open
compound. En dashes are also used to join hyphenated compounds. So, if you have two hyphenated
words that you're joining together, we would use an en dash to do the joining. For example, post-
Jacksonian-pre-Nixonian politics, you've got two hyphenated phrases and an en dash in between to
join them. You should not add spaces around an en dash but, depending on the typeface that you're
using, the size of the typeface and the characters that are surrounding the dash, you may need to
add what are called thin spaces on either side of an en dash. A good rule of thumb is that if the dash
touches, or almost touches, any character then a thin space is needed. A thin space is really just
what it sounds like it's a space that's thinner than normal and a thin space is actually about a fifth of
an em wide. Now, depending on the software they are using, you may be able to insert a thin space
just by using a menu or maybe a menu choice, but, if that's not the case, you can create your own
thin spaces by typing a space highlighting it and making it smaller. How do you create en dashes?
Well, en dashes are not characters that are included on a standard keyboard. So, they're considered
special characters. You're going to need to use a special menu or a special key combination in order
to create an en dash. On a Mac, you can create an en dash by holding down the option key and
typing a hyphen. If you're using a computer with the Windows operating system, you can create an
en dash by holding down the alt key and typing the numbers 0 1 5 0. In HTML, if you're a web
designer, the character entity for an en dash is this: Let's summarize. Stop using hyphens when you
really need an en dash instead. Use an en dash when you want to show ranges, join open compound
words, or join hyphenated compounds. En dashes are easy to insert into your documents and they
will make your documents more professional. That's Law 27. Show Ranges Using En Dashes.

28 Clarify, and improve readability, using hyphens

- Law 28: Clarify and improve readability using hyphens. Hyphens are dash characters that are
available on all standard keyboards. So hyphens are not special characters. Because of this, hyphens
are the dash character that you're probably the most familiar with. Hyphens are less wide than both
em dashes and en dashes. Although most people are familiar with hyphens, their usage can be a
little bit confusing and sometimes complicated. Writers and editors are really the people who are
responsible for including hyphens in the text that you may be typesetting. So, as a desktop publisher,
what do you need to know about hyphens and when to use them? Hyphens should be used to
improve readability and clarify meaning. Let's look at a few examples. Hyphens are used when two
or more words are acting as a single modifier and appear before a noun. An example of this is five-
dollar bills. Using the hyphen here makes it clear that we're talking about multiple bills that are
worth five dollars each. Because we join the words "five" and "dollar" with a hyphen, it's clear that
both of those words are acting as a single phrase to modify or describe the word "bills." The phrase
five dollar bills, with no hyphens, is describing very different. This phrase is describing five one-dollar
bills. Without the hyphen, the word "five" is assumed to be modifying or describing the words
"dollar bills." Let's look at some other examples where hyphens can help clarify meaning or make
words easier to read. You should use a hyphen when you're joining a letter with a word, like A-frame
or X-ray. Without the hyphen, these words could cause some difficulty when reading in a document.
You should use a hyphen when you're using the prefix re and you mean "to do over." An employee
who re-signs is very different from an employee who resigns. Use a hyphen if you're joining a prefix
with a proper noun. An example is anti-American. The uppercase letter of the proper noun, here,
American, without a hyphen, makes this a strange-looking word. Use a hyphen if you're joining a
prefix with a root word and the prefix ends in the same letter that the root word starts with. An
example is ultra-ambitious, or non-native. You can see that the a in "ultra" and the a in "ambitious,"
the n in "non" and the n in "native" both repeat. Without the hyphens, these words are pretty
clumsy and difficult to read. Use a hyphen if you're joining two words that contain the same three
letters in a row, such as cross-section. Again, without the hyphen, this word becomes a little clumsy
and definitely more difficult to read. You should hyphenate all numbers between 21 and 99. This
helps make it clear that two words are being combined to form one number. Use hyphens in phone
numbers and social security numbers. Here, hyphens are being used to chunk these strings of
numbers and to help clearly define them for readers. If you're in the United States and you see this
string of numbers, you would know right away that this is probably a telephone number. But without
the hyphens, this string becomes a lot less obvious. Also use a hyphen if a person has two last names
that are being joined together. It's important to note that a hyphen is not the same as a minus sign.
If you're creating a document that contains mathematical formulas, don't use a hyphen if what you
really need is a minus sign. A minus sign is a special character that's included in most professionally-
designed typefaces. Notice how the hyphen looks really small. The minus sign's been properly sized
for the numbers that surround it. Let's summarize. Hyphens can be confusing little bits of
punctuation. To help clarify the confusion, remember to use a hyphen if it improves readability or
clarifies meaning. When in doubt, you can always consult a dictionary or a style guide. You may find
conflicting hyphenation rules between these sources. People don't always agree on what should be
hyphenated and what shouldn't. But what's most important is consistency. Pick a rule and stick with
it throughout your documents. That's law 28. Clarify and improve readability using hyphens.