Many tend to use their choice of font and textual arrangement on a whim rather than following good design practices, or functional goals¹. A prime example of this is those who use the automatic^A justify alignment on small blocks of text, such as the center of the paragraph in the image.

IT LOOKS LIKE THIS

DO YOU SEE ALL OF THAT WASTED SPACE?!

This was spawned from some issues on a friend of mine’s blog (http://blog.joerenken.com), as well as some issues at work. My friend, Joe, was repeatedly using justify for small blocks of text advertising previous posts. This is not how justify is meant to be used. This justification looks like crap. All text alignments have their purposes. Left align for most generic writing, center for headings and certain text placements, and right align for those occasional pieces of text that are to the right of an object placed on the page.

Justify is a relic from a bygone era, an era of newspapers and little new york boys who sang and dance when the newspaper companies wouldn’t pay them enough. Justify was set up to allow the articles to fill up the pre-arranged blocks of text on each page of the newspaper and make it look somewhat full. If you get bored and find one of these relics, open up to some of the small column articles and you will notice occasionally some lines will be spaced wider than others. This is the justify alignment.

In the digital world it is much less necessary to align text in the justify method. We aren’t losing money per millimeter of whitespace and the amount of time it takes to beautify a paragraph (to an acceptable level)^C is damn near negligible. The only acceptable reason I can find to use this archaic alignment is for aesthetic value in recreating the newspaper look and feel. If anyone can come up with a better counter argument please send it to me. I will post any well argued points here. Such as this.

FONTS

WHY DOES EVERYONE* USE COMIC SANS OR PAPYRUS. AHHHH RAGE!
Well in reality not everyone makes these mistakes. Those who do simply don’t know any better. I remember those days…. when I was 10.  My issues with Fonts/Font-Faces/Type-Faces can be broken down into two parts:

Font Vendors/Foundries

Font foundries, as they prefer to be called since making a font is apparently as hard as making medieval weaponry, are organizations who’s sole goal is to make more fonts for the luddites and graphic designers of the world to enjoy at the highest premium they can come up with. Of course, by enjoy, I mean to frustrate all those who realized it is impossible to take someone writing in Comic Sans seriously.^B

WARNING WARNING TECHNOBABBLE ALERT!

Quick background on how a font works. Fonts are made up of glyphs, these glyphs are stored in a table. This character table should never change.  Apparently some venders like to veer off standards in an attempt to ascend above the rest and mess with this table causing anyone with software that keep track of glyph IDs TO START PRINTING GIBBERISH!. GAH!

END TECHNO BABBLE

Font Faces

The lifeblood of any document. The choice of font face can be based on a variety of reasons, desired tone, formality of the document, and personal preference. Unfortunately many times personal preference is the only point many base their choice of face on and those with less font exposure tend to choose a series of fonts that look….”friendly”. Like Comic Sans.
Rather than going any further allow me to share with you a video from college humor:

Thank you for reading my rant and sharing in my pain. Do not become another tool making uninformed design choices .

~Fred

Pictured: a tool

¹Read as “ZOMG THIS LOOKS PRETTY YES LET’S USE THIS
*Mainly Luddites
EDITS:
^AEdit: it was pointed out to me I was falsely including people who manually justify their text. This tends to be graphic designers who set out to do this with a very specific intent.
^BI am sure some foundries can justify their worth. Maybe I should be targeting their legal and/or marketing departments.
^CSee edit A. Manual paragraph beautification on a printed or rasterized document can be a massive pain.