- 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.