learning as you go...

Through Poynter.org and Knight Ridder there's a site called NewsU where anyone can take brief online courses about a variety of news-related topics. This afternoon I took part of a course in typography (all about fonts and the rules for designing pages with them). I've been designing pages for over a year without any formal training on the matter. This hasn't been much of a problem yet, but intuition will only get you so far if you're trying to move up from the small weekly paper.

Today's lesson was several dozen typography terms and tips -- part review and part new knowledge for me. That new knowledge would have come in handy nine hours earlier as I was breaking those laws.

• Thou shall not make widows (single words for the last line of a paragraph);
• Thou shall not make orphans (single lines before an empty line beginning a new column);
• Thou shall align thy baselines (body text should line up from column to column); and
• Thou shall not make rivers (narrower columns of especially loose justified text).

A couple I had heard before but choose to overlook when convenient.

I like the challenge of layout. It's putting together a puzzle with either too many or too few pieces and no indication beforehand what the puzzle's supposed to look like. It does get frustrating, though, when a piece "fits" somewhere but you can't leave it there because it violates design principles. For instance, today: I had a ten-inch tall column with a six inch story and a three inch photo beneath it on the front. One inch was all white, and filler ads aren't allowed on page one...