#1 Centering Everything
While centered content can communicate traditional, formal, and conservative, it also creates visual flow issues
#2 Warped or Naked Photos
Warped: Photo is out of proportion
Solution: Resize your photos in proportion to the original
Naked: The photo has no end, it blends into the background
Solution: Give the photo a hairline border or change the background color
#3 Too Many Fonts
- Fonts can bring character, color, texture, and pattern to a layout
- Too many fonts can cause confusion
- Limit yourself to 2 fonts per layout
Layout Sins
13 Amateur Errors
#4 Bulky Border & Boxes
- Borders and boxes are like fences, they communicate stop
- Ask yourself what you are fencing in or out
- Chunky borders call attention, not good attention
- When creating a border think "barely there", lingerie strap
#13 Justified Rivers
Don't let there be too much space in between your words it causes readability problems
#7 Four Corner & Clutter
- Don't fill all four corners and clutter your layout
- Space things out and group the together
#5 Cheated or Missing Margins
- Margins inside a box are called inset
- Margins outside a box are called offset
- Without these two, your text will squish against a box, inside and out
#11 Bad Bullets
- Using the wrong kind of bullets for lists
- Asterisks are not bullets
- Improperly aligning bulleted lists
- Always align vertically
#12 Widows & Orphans
#10 Tacky Types
- A typographic widow refers to a few lonely words or a hyphenated word stranded at the bottom of a column
- An orphan refers to a few lonely words stranded at the top of a leg/column
Reversing: Light font on a dark background - don't do unless you can justify
Stroking: When glyphs are outlined - just don't
All caps: Typically a no, but if used make sure it doesn't interfere with communication
Underline: Never underline type to emphasize it, only underline to communicate live link
#9 Busy Backgrounds
The background should not interfere with your visual communication
#8 Trapped Negative Space
#6 Stairstepping
- Don't have a random blank space in the center of your layout
- Push negative space towards the outer edges of the layout
This
is
stairstepping
- Don't do this just to fill space
- Align your elements vertically or horizontally