134. THE NON-DESIGNER'S TYPE BOOK

Be consistent

Whatever you're doing with your captions, be consistent. Don't confuse
your reader; be thoughtful. Use the same alignment, typeface and style, size
and leading. Be consistent about the placement—such as how far below
the bottom edge of the photograph you place it, or aligning it with a base¬
line. Use a style sheet for the captions. (If you don't know how to use the
style sheets in your application, you must learn ! Style sheets are one of the
most important features you can master.)

There are little tricks in every application for ensuring that the placement
of captions is consistent—ask other people who use the same page layout
application what tricks they use.

135

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Every page of type contains at least a few words or headlines that need to
stand out, either because they are important to the content, or perhaps the
words need to be emphasized to add enough visual interest to the page so
a reader is attracted to it. No matter what the reason, there are appropriate
and inappropriate ways to call attention to particular words.

DON'T DO THIS

The inappropriate ways of emphasizing certain words or phrases are gen¬
erally holdovers from using the typewriter, when our only options were to
type words in ALL CAPS or underlined. Rarely should you use all caps,
and never should you underline. Never. That's a law.

When words are set in all caps, we lose the recognition of the shape of the
word and are forced to read the word letter by letter (how many times have
you read that now?). For instance, the word "cat" in lowercase has a differ¬
ent shape from the word "dog," and that shape helps us identify it. When
the words CAT or DOG are set in all caps, their rectangular shapes are
identical.

Italic, not underline

Typewriters, obviously, could not type in italic, so an underline on a type¬
writer was meant to fake an italic; that's why you were taught to type book
titles with underlines, and why you underlined words in mid-paragraph
when you wanted to emphasize them. But on your computer you have true
typesetting choices—you don't have to fake it anymore, you can actually
type in italic. Besides, the underline is usually too close to the bottoms of
the letters and actually cuts into the descenders. And underlining an italic
word is simply redundant.