Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

Chapter 22. Line Breaks and Hyphenation

Your design project is complete. Graphics are in place, colors have been chosen, paper has been selected, your client has signed off on the project, it’s ready to go to press. But you need to check one last thing —your line breaks, or how each line of type ends. Yes, that means every line in your entire project, every headline, every caption, every line in every paragraph! Certain elements are inappropriate at the ends of lines, such as too many hyphens, small words that hang over an empty space in the next line, awkward phrases, the last half of a hyphenated word as the last line of a paragraph, among others. These are details that might not seem important at first, but these details are what give your ...