Creative Tips 3: More About Space

By now, if you read last week's newsletter, you're starting to think that from a designer's perspective, there seems to be as much importance placed on the spaces around and between things as there is on the things themselves. And you're right.

One of the great concert pianists of the 20th Century once remarked that what defines a great performer is not the notes he plays, but the spaces between them. The same is true for the visual arts, which includes everything from painting and sculpture to the way you lay out your resume before you send it to a prospective employer. Good spacing can make a document easy and inviting to read. Bad spacing can make it so uncomfortable that your reader will feel vaguely annoyed, if he or she even bothers to read your carefully crafted message.

We looked last time at the margins around your text, and I hope we have now banished cramped pages and stingy-looking margins forever. Now let's turn to another important bit of space: the one between the lines.

Why is that important? From a purely mechanical point of view, it has to do with how your eyes move when you are reading a piece of text.

Before we begin, there's one term I want to clear up for those who may not know it: Point. A point is a centuries-old measurement related to type, equal to 1/72nd of an inch. 12 points (the usual default size of text in a word processor) are 1/6th of an inch. In the days of metal type, the point size of a font was the height of the metal block that each letter was engraved on, which allowed a little empty space above and below the actual letter. All the blocks, of course, had to be the same height so the lines of text would be straight.

Do My Eyes Deceive Me?

Have you ever had the experience when reading something that you accidentally started reading the same line over again, or the text suddenly made no sense until you realized you had inadvertently skipped a line? I'd guess that the answer is "Yes." I'll take another guess and venture that you didn't enjoy the experience and that you felt a bit annoyed. In all likelihood, you didn't bother reading that book or article further unless you had to.

Why did that happen? Without going into elaborate details, it was because the lines were too closely spaced or too far apart in relation to the width of the text. Your eyes have to make a jump to the left and down to catch the beginning of the next line. If that line is too close to (or too far from) the one before, you jump too far, or not quite enough, and end up reading the wrong line. Exasperating, no? Well, you don't want to do that to your readers, so let's look at the solution.

Spacing Those Lines

You have already shortened the length of your text lines by giving generous left and right margins. That's good, because your reader's eyeballs don't have to leap a yard to the left to find the next line. Even so, if you're working with Word's or Open Office's default line spacing, you're probably still a bit cramped. Here is an example, using Word's default line spacing and the typeface Arial:

The Latin text helps to point up the problem. Even if you catch the next line each time as you read, it's not terribly comfortable, is it? Also it's obvious that the whole paragraph looks crowded, doesn't it, and a bit intimidating. When designers and typographers refer to the "color" of a piece of text, they mean the overall "blackness" of the type. This is a whole subject unto itself, but we're looking here at a good example of what "color" is.

We fix it using the line spacing feature buried in Word's format commands. (Every word processing program has an equivalent.) As you see, the default is "Single" spacing, a term that comes from the days of typewriters. If you swung the carriage back (or pressed "Return" on an electric typewriter) one time, you got single spacing. For "Double" spacing you did it twice. Really fancy typewriters had a special setting for "One and a half" spacing. Word provides all of these, but they're a pretty crude approach to spacing.

Why Word considers line spacing to be a part of paragraph formatting, when it depends on the size of the type, is obscure. But I digress...

Buried in this dialog, which you can reach from the "Format" menu, is a setting called "At Least," and this is your friend when you want to make something look really good. When we switch from "Single" to "At least" we see where the problem lies: The text size is 12 point and the line spacing is ALSO 12 points. That's almost never going to look good when it hits the page, so we increase it. In this case, to 16 points:

And here's what our text now looks like:

I'm no fan of Arial as a typeface, but here it really illustrates the point very well. This text is much more comfortable to read. It's easier on the eye to go from one line to the next, and its "color" is no longer that dense, intimidating crush of words.

Typographers refer to the spacing between lines as "leading" (pronounced as in "lead pipe cinch"). The term comes from the days of metal type, when strips of lead were inserted between lines of text to give it the spacing that was needed. Type with no extra lead strip was "set solid." That is what "Single" line spacing is. In our example we added "four extra points" of leading.

If, in reading this, you thought "Hey, what about if I just shortened the lines?" then go to the top of the class. Narrow columns of text need less leading, because the eye doesn't have to travel as far. This works in newspapers, for example, but not in a typical document that has only a single column of text down the page.

You can train your eye to recognize good and bad spacing. Next time you read a book or a magazine, notice text that is inviting and comfortable to read. Compare it to text that makes you flinch a bit before you start reading. Observe how margins and line spacing affect how easily (or not) you read the text. After a while, you'll really start to notice it, and your presentation in print will look better and better.

This Week's Bonus Tip

When you're typing DON'T type two spaces after a period, a semicolon or a colon. I know you were told to do this by your grandmother, but it is another typewriter habit that you have to help stamp out. The letters and punctuation on a typewriter all occupy the same amount of space, 10 to the inch or 12 to the inch, fixed. To make a space between sentences look like one, you had to add an extra space on a typewriter. When you type text using a proportional-spaced font (which is almost all of them except Courier and Elite), this kind of spacing is already built into the font by the designer. You not only don't need an extra space, it looks odd.

See you next week!

Alan

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative is a design, photography and copy editing service located in Los Angeles County, California.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.