5 September 2009

Perhaps the most important thing we can do to a printed block of justified type is found in section 9.4.1 of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. (The good graphic designer will tote this as his bible if he does not have it memorized.) It’s a simple rule:

Good justification is calculated paragraph by paragraph instead of line by line. And the best computer justification now relies on microscopic adjustments to the space between and within the letters as well as the space between the words. In this book, for example, the justification engine has been permitted to vary the intercharacter spacing by ±3% and to adjust the width of individual glyphs by ±2%. The bulk of the work is still done by adjusting the spaces between words, but there are more letters than spaces in these lines. Tiny adjustments to spaces within and between the letters therefore go a long way toward creating a page of even color and texture.

“A page of even color and texture” is what we’re after here, which makes a much more pleasant reading experience. In Adobe InDesign CS3, these adjustments look like this (click to see it bigger):

Below are before and after examples using the same adjustment allowances Bringhurt used in his book (±3% intercharacter spacing, ±2% glyph scaling).

Before

After

I use this simple rule in all my printed work where justified type is used. Whether or not people know what it is, they see the difference. In our day of digital Word Processing, precision details like this are what bestow us the honor of charging money to set type.