Friday, January 23, 2009

Widows...

What is a widow? An Orphan?
No they are not a woman who lost her husband, or a child with out parents.
A widow is two things. One, a line of a paragraph that appears at the top of a page and two, am uncomfortably short line at the end of a paragraph. Usually a word or two short words.
An orphan is a line of a paragraph appearing at the bottom of the page. The opposite of the first definition of widow.

How do you fix these problems?
There are a few ways to fix this problem. You can try adjusting the leading (space between lines of text), adjust the tracking (space between letters), rewriting a portion of the paragraph, hyphenating words or adjusting the margins and or columns the text is in. If you are working on a newspaper, magazine, text book (for learning) you may also consider including pull quotes, or adding in an image, diagram, or figure.

Why do I bring this up?
Well, I was going though the Christmas cards my company received and I found this one card that caught my eye and made me die a little bit on the inside:

Click to enlarge

This goes along with the second definition of "widow". There is NO reason that "Year" should be on it's own line. It looks highly unprofessional and unfinished. This could have been fixed by staring a new line break:

Wishing you Peace and
happiness during the holidays
and throughout the
New Year

That wasn't hard at all. Now was it?


Definitions and information are from my knowledge and this Wikipedia page.

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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Be Careful With Drop Caps

This gem I found on Flickr. It is from a school of some sorts... the big problem is their drop cap and line breaks. If you look at it, it looks like "Step" and "Slaughter".

What to do differently? Think about re-wording the first sentence, or starting the second line with "and...".

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2 Bad Things...

I haven't updated in a while... so these 2 things hopefully will make up for that!

First is a tear flyer for a "busy local graphic design and printing company". This is full of well thought out Times New Roman type, extra exclamation points, and perfect spelling!
(found on a google search)


Next up is a wonderful portfolio webpage design. This one has 3 images for that roll over for the different aspects of Design this person/company does. You click on the images and it brings you to a page with the small "over state" image from the main page that has different parts of it clickable so you can view a small sample of their work.

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