LAYOUTS

LAYING IT ALL OUT ON THE PAGE: the basics

I know, you though a LAYOUT was a sports move.

Whether you're dealing with a poster, a business card, a book, or a webpage, there are some basic things to keep in mind about laying things out.

We'll first just deal with abstract blocks of text and rectangles as pictures, as in the pictures above. Then, we'll get crazy and start promoting our stuff to the world!

First, let's begin with what we know:
MARGINS
Defined as "the area between the main content of a page and the page edges. The margin helps to define where a line of text begins and ends."

WHAT GOES OUTSIDE THE MARGINS? NADA. NOTHING. ZERO. BACKGROUND NOISE. PARTS OF THINGS THAT ARE IN MOTION INTO AND OFF OF THE PAGE.

They had a practical purpose centuries ago: it was a place you could doodle, or leave little notes.

It also serves a practical purpose for an analog (hands-on) painter: when stretching the canvas, nothing would be cut off. Nowadays, even modern printers cannot assure that anything near the edge won't be cut off, so it is also a safety zone.

In video screens, there are several margins, including text-safe zones, to account for the different kinds of screens that will be viewing the scenes: no director wants anyone missing something off to one side or top or corner.

On a typical Word document, margins are 1' (one inch). We can be a little more lenient, as we're not dealing with inches. The key is to have things ultimately well-balanced in the space of the frame.

If you look at all four of the green layouts above (for magazine? web?), you'll notice white space around all four edges, and then smaller white space between all other items on the pages.

Here in this basketball poster, notice the perfectly even margins on all four sides, with letters matching up to them perfectly!

That's what I'm talking about!

PARAGRAPH ALIGNMENT:

Left paragraph alignment is our usual way of seeing text on a page: it is the default setting in every word processor, as almost all European languages read from left to right. The paragraph itself (the text box) ALSO needs to be object-aligned to some kind of left margin: either of the page, or a margin against a picture to its left, such as it is with this left paragraph-align icon on the left.

Right paragraph alignment is a little more unusual; it's more often an artistic choice in some graphic designs such as posters, business cards, or creative art or children's books where there is a large non-rectangular image to the left that dominates the page.

Right alignment is always used in any business card which has informational text in the lower right corner.

It is also seen regularly on the credits to movies where the role is listed on the left of a list, while the person fulfilling that role is on the right side of the list with left alignment.

Center alignment creates a symmetry on the page, balancing everything equally left and right. It creates a feeling of stasis and can be either horizontally stretched out, or vertically high. It is different from justified alignment in that both left and right sides will be rough.

Center alignment almost always works best when centered on the page. While rules are always made to be broken, you generally would not put center-alignment on the right or left sides of a page.

Exceptions: cartoon "thought" bubbles, or labels in which the words are centered on the label, no matter where the label is placed on the page.

When lines are perfectly in a neat vertical line all the way down both sides, that is called "justified" alignment. It gives a published work a very professional look. Almost all printed books, brochures, and magazines in European languages (such as in the photo of the book towards the top of this section) are printed with justified alignment.

In some cases, where we don't have control of the spacing between the letters themselves, justified can look awful, because there can be huge gaps between words. On this website for instance, I do not often choose "justified" because I am not able to squeeze or stretch out the letter or word spacing. It's not something you'd ever use for text with only has a few words on each line, like addresses, phone #s, etc. And for those of you reading this page on your phones, you will have already noticed those strange large spaces between words on the paragraphs earlier on this page - because of the justified alignment, that does not translate well to phones, even though it looks good on the desktop version.

OBJECT ALIGNMENT:
Everything's got to line up! Whether along the tops, or along the sides,
object alignment gives everything a sense of organization and order.
This command only works when you've selected several objects together.
Then, if there are no icons in the menu bar, go to the
Arrange Menu>Align> choose how you want the objects to line up.

(Find these in your ARRANGE MENU> Align):
OBJECT ALIGN LEFT - you normally would be aligning text on the left, and perhaps also the right sides.
OBJECT ALIGN RIGHT - nice for aligning along a right margin, for instance, or a picture to the right.
OBJECT ALIGN HORIZONTAL - for getting everything lined up in the middle, with paragraph-center-alignment.

OBJECT ALIGN ALONG THE TOP SIDES - you might also be aligning your title and a picture with the top margin.
OBJECT ALIGN HORIZONTAL GOING RIGHT/LEFT (not shown)
ALIGNED ALONG THE BOTTOM EDGES

EDGE ALIGNMENT

In all cases, you want the objects - anything on the outer parts of the page - to align with the margins. This then gives consistency and breathing room for your page layout.

Ideally the edge of the letter rests on the margins perfectly within its text box; however with programs like Google Slides, there's a bit of space, so it's going to just be the text box that aligns. No matter though, as all letters will be the exact distance and will still be perfectly in line!