Index Content Placement Style Art Packaging

2. Placement

2.1) Bubble Centering
Make sure every bubble is dead center. A pixel or two, one way or the other, does in fact make a difference. As long as you have a good eye and pay attention, this isn't very hard to catch. Just don't hesitate to point it out if you see it. Remember, perfection is possible.

2.2) Text Alignment
Personally I believe that, aside from notes, explanations, signs, tables of contents, and similar special instances, all text should be center aligned. A few people left align everything, which just looks awful. Some people center align most, but left (or right) align text up against frame edges. This is generally unnecessary, and looks amateurish and ugly. If the frame edge is an issue, wordwrap it differently, but keep it center aligned.

The exception to this is when you have art or another bubble protruding into a text bubble. In this situation, while the overall bubble alignment should still remain centered, it may be necessary to manually skew a few rows of text one way or the other (in rare cases, all rows may need adjustment, so it no longer looks centered anymore). Still, it's best to start with a center alignment and adjust from there. It may be a bit more difficult, but it lets you make sure the other rows are centered.

Watch out for leading and trailing spaces. Whether or not the editor used text rectangles makes no difference with leading spaces, but trailing spaces is only an issue if they don't. These spaces can undesirably skew rows of text to one side despite center alignment. Also, pay attention to words that are broken onto multiple rows, as a manual hyphen & space ensures proper centering, while automatic word breaks usually results in a half-character width skew.

2.3) Wordwrapping
The general rule for wordwrapping is to go for a convex bubble shape, though for narration boxes, a rectangular shape may be preferable. In any case, bubbles should not look top- or bottomheavy, and should definitely not be concave. If moving a word to another line will make the bubble look better, do so. If minor rephrasing (adding or deleting a word, restructuring the sentence, etc.) will make it look better, do so.

Try not to break a word onto too many rows. Generally, no single word should occupy 3 or more rows, regardless of length. The exception is honorifics and hyphenated compound words. If possible, avoid breaking a word at all. if you can rewordwrap things differently or rephrase slightly to avoid breaking a word, do so.

When you have a bubble where sentences terminate with a ... or --, make sure these marks come at the end of their respective rows.

Index Content Placement Style Art Packaging