Alignment can refer to text, as in the left-aligned body text required in MLA style. But in document design, it means much more; it refers to how the entire document is arranged. Most designers align all their content to some sort of a grid or pattern, creating a distinct, intentional arrangement of items on a page or screen. They use plenty of white space to cushion the items, which makes higher-contrast items pop.

Imagine you are hanging 20 pictures on a wall. You probably should not just bang nails into the wall randomly. You might measure and equalize distances between items, put unusual items in certain places, or put similarly shaped or sized items together. This will provide a sense of order to the arrangement of the items.

Software packages often allow you to draw lines or use an existing invisible grid to which you can “snap” items like images, blocks of text, or graphics. Templates do the hard work of arranging items on a page or screen for you. That’s why so many people use tools like WordPress, Illustrator, Publisher, Word, and PowerPoint—they allow easy and measured arrangement without the hard work of lining everything up by hand.

Newspaper and magazine layout artists once used various kinds of tape, contact cement (rubber cement), or wax adhesives to stick cut-out headlines, text blocks, photos, and ads to a page, just to produce a daily or weekly newspaper. To line up text and image blocks, they used wooden or metal rulers, graph paper, and T-squares. It was slow, tedious work. And rubber cement smells. The digital publishing revolution did away with all that.

Figure 18: Desktop publishing and digital layout tools have eliminated the paper-scissors-ruler-and- glue layout method. (Public Domain image)

Desktop publishing tools have made layout and editing much easier and faster. The WordPress online interface pictured below in Figure 19 shows that the process is much easier, though some would argue that it lacks soul. But it’s readable, simple, clear, and accessible to anyone with access to the internet.

Figure 19: An early iteration of the WordPress online editing interface. Image Credit: “WordPress main theme” by D135-1r43~commonswiki is released under GNU GPLv3.