- 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.