aidanfindlater.com

Left, Right, Center, Justified. One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong…

Once upon a time I liked to justify* all my text. I loved it. It seemed so perfect, somehow, to have everything to nicely lined up and filled out. One day my dad was looking over a school report of mine and mentioned how he found it hard to read it because it was justified (the alignment, not the content). This got me thinking.

Fast forward to present day. I no longer justify any of my text. I’ve come around to my dad’s viewpoint. When you present text to a reader, they should never notice the alignment. It’s like a movie’s soundtrack; when used properly it’s subtle and really helps set the mood, but when done poorly it’s disruptive and can ruin a good movie. My most recent encounter with justified alignment was on an application form for something-or-other. It made me shudder. Large font + Justified alignment = Recipe for ugliness.

There are a lot of people who use it wisely, of course. Point in case are newspapers. Pretty much any designer knows when to and when not to justy text. The problem comes when the masses get their hands on it. Just like web sites. Freaking anyways, personal websites are mostly freaking ugly. I’m digressing, so I’ll save that one for another day.

I give Justified Alignment the Tobacco Industry Award for Popular Product That Kills People (Or At Least Makes Them Very, Very Sick).

* “Justify” is a way of aligning text so that it takes up the whole width of the page. If you want an example, open up a newspaper (a real deadtree edition) and notice how all the text seems to line up so perfectly.

P.S. As some may notice, my blog is actually justified (at least this layout is). It’s mostly that people seem to abuse it. It can look really, really ugly very, very easily.