A common error I find doing my Usability and Design analysis, is the use of justify. As I have said in a few other posts, justifying text is for the use of block quotes, and not regular content.
Here is a classic example of justify text gone astray. When visiting the travel site, France This Way, you will see immediately why styling text with justify is not a great idea.
The four main menu descriptions are way over spaced, and the descriptions look more like tag boxes than something to read.
Justify Pushes Content Below the Fold
The site continues to use justify throughout all of its content, and this is bad why? It creates a second usability issue, to a lesser extreme, of forcing more vertical scrolling. Each bit of content the site had was lead by a photo. The photos seemed sized to fit the content. If you look at the site again, you will see that if the author did not use justify, the text would be tighter, and very often have one less line of text per image. If this was the case, the images could be a little bit smaller, the site would be a little tighter, and more content would be visible above the fold.
Those of you that argue that justify makes a site look more professional, what would the author use in this case to show visitor testimonials?
ariel (1)
Chris (1)
Curtis (1)
Thanks for the review
I tried without justify on the homepage and that doesn’t look great either – there is a lot of space gets left to the right of the text. I think I’ll try with smaller pictures or text under the images instead.
I changed it for the ‘normal’ paragraphs and agree it looks better throughout the site
Cheers
Looks like you took the justify advice. Also, there is another thing that could make your site look a lot tighter. Your line spacing is kind of huge. I use line-height:1.35em for this site.
[...] Supreme over use of justify aligned content [...]
[...] Stop using Justify! Justify is for block quotes. When you justify you content it makes it harder to read, more difficult to find the next line, and though you may think it looks nicer, know that many think it’s comical that you made such a silly error. The excuse that many other website do it does not fly in my book. Look at some of the most popular sites/blogs on the net to see how they do it. They don’t, and they don’t because it is the wrong format. [...]
Those of you that argue that justify makes a site look more professional, what would the author use in this case to show visitor testimonials?
so .. what would the answer to this question be ?
Thanks for commenting. If regular content is justified, then things like testimonials and quotes will have to be differentiated in another way besides using justify. It was a rhetorical questions.
Justify is used for just two reasons. In use with small narrow columns, like that in newspaper or in use to show block quotes. A block quote is typically used when the quotation is more than four lines of text. This is basic school stuff.
rally ? am like ve yaris
very nice blog, keep it up, will share this to others.