Almost everybody these days can do desktop publishing at home. With the digital age in full swing a lot of easy to use and fully featured desktop publishing software are available our there for novice and professional alike. However, good as these tools seem to be, the person who uses them still needs to know the correct ways in designing one’s page. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem lacking in this area. In fact if you look at published material in print and over the Internet, a lot of people are making a lot of simple but very unfortunate mistakes in desktop publishing. Some of these mistakes should actually have been avoided with the proper training and a little good advice.

If you are going to embark on desktop publishing then it is good to learn from other’s mistakes. Avoid the common pitfalls in desktop publishing below and you should find yourself creating effective and professional looking pages in no time.

 

1. Block Text – The worst thing you can do in desktop publishing is to create a page that has too much text. A lot of professionals emphasize this fact and immediately criticize pages that do so. Some people call these gray pages or block texts while others call it plain horrible. Have you seen pages with a headline and just a big chunk of text below.? Maybe you can detect a few indents here and there, but its basically one big block of text. Pages like this are daunting to read, and you will loose readers just by a single look of it.

To combat this effect you can do a number of things. First you can use subheadings as a transition tool between paragraphs. This can let people center on the important subtopics that they want to read immediately. Next, you can use some white spaces by adding line spaces, margins, headers and footers to your page. These techniques  basically cuts and defines the area of text  eliminating the “block effect” that your text may be projecting.

2. Excessive or improper white spaces – Now, of course don’t over do the white spaces. Any kind of published medium looks unprofessional when it has a lot of white spaces and white spaces in odd areas. This may be a spillover from newspaper layout artists where excessive white space is basically wasted space and lost revenue. Of course that is basically the primary reason, white spaces are lost opportunities and a sign of an uninspired design. Big white spaces should probably have been filled out by supporting text and images that can improve the look of  a page.

3. Columns and wrong justification – Another common and well talked about desktop publishing mistake are justified paragraphs in narrow columns. I am sure some of you might have encountered something like this. Justified paragraphs with narrow columns will appear odd since the publishing software increase the space between words to fit them in a column. This leads to a lot of unnecessary white spaces and a less that professional look. Remedy this by only using the right or left paragraph alignment options.

4. Paragraph orphans and widows – It is quite annoying to read an article or letter to its next page only to find a sentence or two on it. In some of the worst cases of paragraph orphans and widows, phrases or just a word can be left out alone in another page or section. It is best to avoid this kind of mistake. Having paragraph orphans and widows means having to printout or publish an extra page. A page that probably is 95% wasted. If you find widows or orphans in your pages, it is best to rewrite the paragraphs themselves and cut down on any superfluous words and sentences that you may have used. Hopefully you’ll clear up enough space to reclaim those orphans and widows.

5. Odd image alignments – Images are a little tricky to embed in pages. Hence a lot of people are finding themselves with pictures cutting an ugly swat of text in odd alignments. This can disrupt the flow of the text making it harder to read as people follow through the lines. The best way to avoid this is to learn how to resize and to anchor and align images properly with the text.

6. Image sizes – As long as we are in images, another common mistake people make in desktop publishing is to use image sizes as they are, or they standardize the size of all images in a page to one set of dimensions. Now, this might be cold and efficient but it doesn’t maximize the image’s effect. A good practice would be to use your most important and eye catching image and make it the largest one among the rest. This might hinder your layout efforts a bit but its going to pay up big time with a better looking one.

7. Improper use of color – Now some pages make a huge mistake in using too much or too loud colors. Nothing screams “amateur” more than this. Colors should compliment the content of a page and not distract attention away from it. So plan on using colors as light complimentary backgrounds. They are not the stars of the show, the content is.

8. Using font size to fit everything – Some people think they can solve page design problems solely by adjusting the font size. A common mistake is to just change a paragraph’s font size to fit it snugly in a page while other paragraphs and sections remain at their original sizes. Perhaps some of you may argue that a “0.5” difference in isn’t really much but still ruins the overall look of a page. The best way to solve problems like that is to edit the content itself. In most cases you can cut or sacrifice some words or phrases so that you can fit a paragraph to the location you want. This makes your content more concise, and you didn’t have to have odd font sizes in your page as well.

9. Unprofessional character typefaces – Amateurs sometimes have the tendency to play with font typefaces and effects. Underlines, strikethroughs, bold italics and other special character effects may look good, but an excessive use of them makes a page cluttered and unprofessional. So minimize the use of these effects unless they really need to be there.

10. Using too many different font styles – Related to the topic above, another amateurish way to ruin your page is to use a lot of different and wacky font styles. Some people actually use different fonts for different sections of their pages. This makes it look like a collage of pasted work. If you are not going for that particular effect, it is wiser to stick to one or two font styles max.

11. Extensive use of text boxes – Text boxes like pictures can cut through text and content and disrupt the flow of ideas. So it is best to minimize their use and align them in the page so that they don’t cut through anything. Aim for one or two text boxes in a page max. Balance it out with the amount of images as well.

12. Improper Punctuations – The use of punctuations have varied widely ever since the Internet was born. So some designers these days use punctuations to add “smile”effects and other odd writing styles that use punctuations. However popular this may be, it still looks improper and unprofessional to any decent page design. So it is a good idea to use proper punctuations in proper uses especially if your page isn’t a personal letter or blog.

13. Hyphenation – The automatic punctuation feature in some desktop publishing applications can actually ruin pages, especially the ones with narrow columns. Paragraphs with the excessive  hyphens always look ugly. Combat this effect by turning off automatic hyphenation in your software and do the hyphens manually if they are needed.

14. Grammar and Spelling – Of course, as a standard writing practice, always correct your grammar and spelling. No published article, report or letter can really survive without proper grammar in sentences and the correct spelling of words. Small mistakes can probably get by, but with the advent of grammar and spell checking, this shouldn’t be the case. So check them twice or thrice to be sure. If your software is a little bit old and not updated, then try and check them yourself if you have too.

15. Reviewing the design too quickly – Lastly, once people finish their page, what most of them do is to just take a once over with their page and then publish it already. This is a mistake, and perhaps a major one. A professor once said that it is good to “write or design in white heat, and then edit in cold blood”. Some mistakes that you may have made in your work will only pop up in your mind after you review your work an hour or so after making it. So after your initial draft, take a break and edit your design later. Your eyes should immediately pickup any mistakes on the overall design with a little rest.

So those are the major pitfalls you should avoid in desktop publishing. Keep them in mind as you create your pages, and always be open to new suggestions and ideas so that you can keep on improving your work.