Long Hours of Design

Underline-y Goodness

Paragraph rules and underlines are highly under-appreciated.

Here’s a fun little underline technique for creating a tag exclaiming the newness of an item.

"New" Tag

"New" Tag

This is pretty simple.

1. Type “New” with a space before and a space after.
2. I’ve styled this with small caps and brought the size down a bit.
3. Now, we create an underline, staring with the space before NEW and ending with the space after. Make the “Weight” about the same size as the rest of the body text. Adjust the offset until it looks right.
   
   New Tag Underline Settings

   New Tag Underline Settings

   That’s it!

You don’t need to be an acrobat for this balancing act.

Here’s a useful InDesign feature I often forget about: “Balance Ragged Lines.”

Ragged lines come up in a block of right- or left-aligned text and depend on word lengths, column width and similar variables. Instead of a natural ebb and flow of line endings, ragged lines jut out unevenly like some sort of typographical flotsam and jetsam

“Balance Ragged Lines,” buried under the Paragraph panel flyout, does pretty much what it sounds like it does. ^{[ 1 ]} It adjusts each line in the paragraph so they’re all of approximately equal length—and so there aren’t lines sticking out every which way.

Example

Here are the ragged lines I want to tackle.

Ragged Lines, Oh My!

Ragged Lines, Oh My!

Now, this isn’t actually so bad; my lines flow pretty much as I’d expect them to.

But the bottom two lines—where the URL breaks onto the last line—that’s a problem. I want that URL on one line, not two.

I could shore this up with forced line breaks—but I can’t add just one (putting the URL on the bottom line) as then I’d REALLY have some ragged lines. No, in this case I’d have to add a break to the end of every line.

I’d get this:

A Chicken for Every Pot, and a Forced Break for Every Line

A Chicken for Every Pot, and a Forced Break for Every Line

Yikes! Too much.

So let’s use Balance Ragged Lines.

Balance Ragged Lines—My Hero!

Balance Ragged Lines—My Hero!

And Viola! Well-balanced lines.

The Pièce de résistance

The Pièce de résistance

Caveats

This is a great feature, but I’d caution against its overuse.

Applying “Balance Ragged Lines” can sometimes destroy the typographic-rhythm paragraph lines have, and make them look somehow “unnatural” or “just not right.”

I’d recommend steering clear of using this everywhere—but in those places where unwieldy lines have gotten away from you, “Balance Ragged Lines” is a real peach.