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Posts Tagged ‘picture captions’

Print mediums have guidelines and elements that should be followed in order to make things more legible and easier on the eyes for the individuals who are reading.  Even though some of these elements may have evolved over centuries, they are still very effective and should be followed should you wish to impact your readers.

1. Using “serif fonts” in the main body utilizes the human eyes ability to recognized the shape of words and not necessarily the letter by letter of each word. A serif font is a font that uses lines at the top and bottom of each letter to help guide the eye to each line easily and smoothly.  A san serif font usually forgoes that line and can be used for smaller areas of text such as headlines, bylines and picture captions. Excellent examples of good serif fonts are Garamond, Century Schoolbook or Bookman.
2. A “Lead-in” for the first paragraph of an article helps give a quick synopsis of what the article might be about, but also should be the ‘teaser’ that will get the reader to want to continue to read more.  Identify these first few lines with a subtle change in the font and layout so that it does stand out and leads the eye to it.
3. Avoid hyphenating words.  Using hyphens should be reserved for phone numbers in most instances and a few other rare  instances when it calls for last names and hyphenated combination words.  Breaking a word at a syllable usually can be avoided when playing with the leading and spacing of the lines.  This keeps the flow of the words and articles going smoothly for your readers.
4. Old habits are hard to break.  Including those that we had taught to us when the typewriter classes were taught to us in high school.  This includes the double spacing after periods and colons.  As a rule of thumb, any double spaces are now obsolete and professional typesetters don’t use them.
5. Full justification may look good but does make it harder to read.  Next time you get a chance, fully justify your article in your column layout and in turn look at the white ‘lanes’ of space that it creates.  This can be extremely distracting to the eye and also cause distortion of short words just to fill in the space of the line to even it up. Use left justification when you have long lines and be cautious in using full justification when you don’t absolutely need it.