Halloween is just a week away and to get you in the mood we’ll be rolling out a series of tales about common typographic errors over the next few days. We won’t leave you completely in the cold and dark – we’ll also tell you how to avoid committing such deadly sins. And now, for our first horror story:
She opened the book and screamed. Remnants of the crime splattered across the page. Crimson in magnitude, the glaring error ran in deep rivulets throughout each paragraph. “RIVERS!” she shrieked. “RIIIIIVERS!”
It was a crime of negligence, really. A rookie mistake by a designer not bent toward mayhem, but hurried to finish the job. He simply hadn’t checked after full justifying the paragraphs in the text. As a result, his ignorance had created unsightly patterns of white space that ran the length of the pages in the document – rivers.
He could’ve easily avoided it all. By taking some extra time to adjust his hyphenation and justification settings or choosing a typeface with different letterspacing the reader would be spared. The ultimate fix to avoid such pain and suffering? Rewriting the copy to fit to the page.
“Rivers!!!” text in graphic set in Dead Mans Chest by Comicraft
2 Comments
I was JUST watching a video about this for my Multimedia class! Too funny. Thanks for the post, Meghan!
I wouldn’t have accepted the word
placement of the ranged left text used.
Whilst I don’t have the typeface used
I would have broken the lines as follows:
I find a It was a crime of negligence, really.
A rookie mistake by a designer not bent
toward mayhem, but hurried to finish the job.
He simply hadn’t checked after full justifying
the paragraphs in the text. As a result, his
ignorance had created unsightly patterns
of white space that ran the length of the
pages in the document – rivers.
He could’ve easily avoided it all.
By taking some extra time to adjust his
hyphenation and justification settings or
choosing a typeface with different letter-
spacing the reader would be spared.
The ultimate fix to avoid such pain and
suffering? Rewriting the copy to fit to
the page.