Priority and Compromise · 27 March 2001
Working with text in space is a matter of constant compromise, of making educated mistakes.
Just as every slight variation of form in a letter affects the space around – you can’t add black without subtracting white in typography – the priorities of graphic design must be evaluated against what is taken away from the quality of text.
Hundreds of years of example have shown that evenness of spacing – between letters, words, lines, paragraphs – is an ideal, an integral component of legible, engaging text. When columns of text are fully justified, or aligned at both left and right margins, the spaces between words must be elastic, expanding or contracting to distribute words across a line, resulting in inevitably uneven spacing. The design of an element on the page becomes the priority, and the quality of the text is compromised.
So long as a designer understands this trade-off, steps can be taken to stave off damage: intelligent adjustment of hyphenation and spacing, letting analphabetic elements like punctuation slip out into the margins, using paragraph indents to store opening quotation marks. These techniques can help rescue a moth-eaten paragraph, but compromises always will be made.
When text is justified to the left margin only, evenness of spacing isn’t a concern, and sometimes, especially when columns are narrow, this is the best solution.
Some claim that justified text implies formality, while a ragged right margin connotes informality. The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail announced, on the occasion of its last redesign, that all news and reporting copy would be set justified, and all commentary would be flush left, implying a more “personal voice.” This sort of baseless application of meaning to technique is common among designers when called upon to explain decisions.
Often the priority is rooted in emphasis, to give the loudest voice to one player on the stage. This ranges from the differentiation of a single element from others in an arrangement of content, to design gestures encompassing the whole, intended to draw attention away from all else on offer, or, just as often, call attention to the designer.
When the priority is to sell – or change meaning, or invoke lifestyle choices, or add value, or satisfy egos – again and again the first compromise designers are willing to make is in the quality of text. Fast, arbitrary decisions that ignore proven conventions, that disregard the fundamental desire of the reader to be informed, that begin and end with what the tools can do.
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