In Thirteen Telltale Signs by Robin Williams, the author describes thirteen common mistakes people make in "do-it-yourself" desktop publishing. Please note that this article was published 12 years ago in Adobe Magazine. With the recent explosion of Web 2.0 tools, I'd like to know what other common mistakes are being made than the 13 listed in this blog. The author recommends the following:
- Helvetica font is outdated-don't use it.
- Use curly quotes for real quotes and straight quotes for inches and feet.
- Don't hit the enter key twice between paragraphs-use the paragraph after and paragraph before features.
- Space once between sentences.
- Avoid typing on gray boxes. Use something else such as a headline font or heavy ruled lines to focus on a piece of type.
- Avoid centered layouts-they're dull.
- Avoid placing borders around your type.
- A standard topographic indent is one em space, which is a space as wide as the point size of type.
- Don't use hyphens in place of bullets.
- Don't use outlined shadowed type
- 10, 10.5, or 11 point type looks more professional.
- Never use the underline feature.
- Avoid using all caps.
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