Hello again, we are now ready to talk about alignment. in graphic design, alignment equals order. Imagine that you have to park your car in a crowded parking lot, where everybody ignores the lines. What else in design as well. If you want your work to look tidy and nice, you need to make some order. The easiest way to create this order is to align our element to a line or a group of lines.
Usually, lines are horizontal and vertical, horizontal and vertical lines together create a grid. Of course, where geometry is not the only option. However, we will exclusively talk about it in this course, since it's part of the most common one. As you can imagine, there are three different types of alignment and they all depends on the surface of the space. We have to feel with our design and life. can be left, center or right.
It can also be a horizontal and vertical. The choice for alignment depends mostly for the culture we're creating the design for. In Western culture, text is read from left to right and from the top to the bottom. From this easy consideration, we can understand why right alignment works much better for short statements. For long blocks. Left Alignment is the better choice.
Center Alignment instead gives a clear sense of orders and majesty. That's why is often used to design wedding invitations or formal stationery. Vertical Alignment is often used to adjust the right section of our design in order to give the right mass to each of them. Another important thing that we have to consider is that our perception of alignment may not match softer perception of it happens sometimes that the spite elements are aligned properly to the invisible line, the result doesn't look good. That happens most of the time because we are using symbols, such as quotation marks that our brain considers not having. In this example, it looks like the mask is pushing to the right, and the text block looks unstable.
It's better to adjust the blocks. In order for the first letter after the quotes to be in line with the first letter of the next line. We call this hanging punctuation. This kind of adjustment should be used with every kind of design element that provokes the same sensation of instability of the quotes, adjust the weight. Now the pixels really often, in order for the design to look solid, we have to change the disposition of the words that compose or attacks. One of the most appreciated adjustment layout is the food justified alignment This alignment tries to make each line start and end at the same left and right border, slightly modifying the spacing between letters.
However, sometimes it could give some odd results that are not acceptable in a good design. To avoid this problem, try to allow hyphenation in your text. If this is not possible, try to adjust the letter spacing, consistency and repetition is the next topic of this course. I wait for you in the next video.