Justifying the Content, Justifying the Format

Feb 182010
 

Go ahead, call me the Justify Cop. I haven’t been pointing fingers too much lately about the use of justify, but after a series of events that have taken place with my work, I think I have the perfect excuse. For this post thank you goes to the developers of San Antonio Air Conditioning Service. They occasionally hire me to review their sites, and were nice enough to let me allow to use this new site as an example.

Besides learning when or when not to justifying text, there is something else that this site needs to justify. It’s the content. Continue reading »

Stop Using Justify

Jun 122008
 

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.

fireshot capture 34 visit france with france travel guide places to visit holidays in france gites www francethisway com 300x179

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?

Do Not Justify

Feb 252008
 

I believe it is an effort to appear more professional in appearance, but I am not sure. If you search for the word “justify” on the Internet, you will find a thousand pages of webmasters trying to figure out how to do it. It’s easy, you just set your alignment to equal justify.

Sample Code: <p align=”justify”>paragraph</p>

Now That You Know How, STOP IT!

You should justify text when using it in block quotes, particularly long quotes. This is the best, most clearly defined use of the justify setting. I am being a little vague on this because I admit, I am not a member of MLA, Modern Language Association, and I cannot find my book to give you the exact details. To slam-dunk this idea though, I want to give you another reason why you should avoid it. Computers mess it up.

Computers Can’t Justify

Yes, they can, but not like people can. Using justify on the web can produce even worse effects than most document applications. The spacing quality is often poor, and can lead to huge gaps if there are several small words on the line. Another more important issue is that visitors use those text alignments to help understand the site design.

If you were to look at 100 web pages today, you would most likely see main menus on the top, left, and center. You can even find some sites with menus on all three spaces. Most web surfers are used to this, and with a quick glance, they should be able to understand where to start. Aligning your text to the one margin only, will help give them an indication on where to start. I would suggest the left please. Aligning text on just one side will also eliminate the extra spaces that occur between the words giving you a real professional appearance. Then, when it comes time to quote someone else’s content, it will all be clearly justified.

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