Typesetting Rules....

I know, they say rules were made to be broken, but, there is one typesetting rule that really, really shouldn't be broken.... and here it is.... it's the rule for typesetting paragraphs, body copy, text ~ whatever you want to call it. The rule is this, your sentence should not be longer than one alphabet, plus half, so that would be 26+13 = 39. So, if you are around 39 characters a sentence, it's OK, it's readable... anything longer than that, then your eye has trouble following the line to the next sentence, and the reader loses track of where he/she was. A little longer is OK, I'd go as far as 60 characters, but if you start hitting 100, that's too much. Shorter is OK. But, not too short or your eyeballs will appear as if they're following around a ping-pong ball!

I notice that some people do this with their journaling and it truly drives me bonkers! They'll have a journaling block that expands the entire width of their 12 inch page.... and this is ok, if the journaling is typeset with a point size that is big, otherwise, if you are typing with 12 point and you are getting 120 characters going in one sentence, you really should break that into 2 columns.... it's just easier for the end reader to read.

(my source for the above picture was http://desktoppub.about.com/library/nosearch/bl-linelength.htm)


Another thing that drives me crazy.... now that I'm on my soapbox (LOL!) is when you are typesetting a title and it's a script font and you use all caps! OMG, that is just like a stabbing knife to my eyeballs! Seriously. Script fonts (cursive) were not meant to be used in all caps, nope, nada, never. It just looks bad, and very hard to read. You do want people to read what you wrote, so make it easy on the eye.

Oh, and while I'm at it, let me just say, and I may have mentioned this before because it's one of my biggest pet peeves, especially if you consider yourself any kind of designer, graphic designer especially, and here they are using inch and foot marks instead of quote marks! Drives me nuts! This is an inch " this is a quote ” mark. See the difference? One is straight, the other curly.

Now, you will notice that while I typed this that it is riddled with foot marks ( ' ) however, I'm typing fast and this is a blog not a brochure, so it's OK on the web. ;-)

Enough about work... I wish I could share with you some of the stuff I've been doing lately, however, I've submitted it! All of it! Wish me luck.