- I hope you enjoyed learning The 33 Laws of Typography.
Abiding by these laws will make sure that
typography works for you and not against you.
These laws will also help you communicate
using text to maximum effect.
Keep in mind that you may not be able to follow
all 33 of these laws at all times, in every document.
There may be times when you have to
break one law in order to follow another.
Here's an example of an image caption in a document.
And you can see, this image caption contains
less than seven characters on the last line.
When you're dealing with narrow blocks
of text like this, it's not uncommon
to end up with these dangling lines of text.
The width of this caption is the same, it's consistent
with all other image captions in our document.
And that's important, because we want to maintain
consistency in our document, remember, that's Law 4.
But we also want to have more than seven
characters on all lines of text, that's Law 11.
In this case, assuming that we cannot rewrite this caption,
I would choose to live with the dangling last line of text.
We're so close to seven characters, and the width
of the text block is so narrow, that it's not too unsightly,
and it's not causing too much visual disruption.
Another option would be to change the width
of all the image captions in your document,
and that could work as well, you could make
the image captions a little narrower
or a little wider in order to fix this issue.
But keep in mind, you may fix the
dangling line in this instance, of this caption,
but you may wind up creating dangling lines
in other captions, other places in your document.
If you follow these 33 laws, and only break them
when you have to, then you're going to be in good shape.
And when you have to choose between two laws,
make the decision that results in the least
amount of harm to the design of your document.
Don't get so focused on following these
33 laws that you lose sight of the goal,
creating beautiful documents with gorgeous typography.
The famous typographer Adrian Frutiger said,
"If you remember the shape of your spoon
"at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape.
"The spoon and the letter are tools,
"one to take food from the bowl,
"the other to take information off the page.
"When it is a good design, the reader has
"to feel comfortable because the letter
"is both banal and beautiful."
The 33 Laws of Typography will help ensure
good type design in your documents.
People may not remember the typefaces you choose,
and they may not remember all of the attention
to detail that you put into your documents,
but like Frutiger says, that's a good thing.
Be happy knowing that readers will be comfortable
in the banality and beauty of your typography.