Typography Mistakes That Undermine Otherwise Good Design

Typography mistakes have an interesting quality: they're invisible to most viewers, but they create a vague sense that something is slightly off. The design doesn't quite feel finished. The type doesn't quite feel intentional. Most people can't say why. I can.

These are the mistakes I encounter most often in work from designers at every level.

Widows and Orphans

A widow is a short line (often a single word) at the end of a paragraph. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph sitting alone at the bottom of a column, with the rest of the paragraph on the following page or column.

Both create visual fragmentation and reduce the sense of considered typesetting. Fixing them: manual line breaks to redistribute the text, tight tracking adjustments on specific paragraphs to pull up the widow, or rewriting the copy slightly if the project allows.

Default Hyphenation

Software hyphenation defaults are too aggressive. They'll hyphenate short words, hyphenate in ways that create awkward breaks, and create multiple consecutive hyphenated lines (called a "stack"). All of these look unintentional.

I always review and adjust hyphenation manually in print work, and I often disable automatic hyphenation entirely in short-copy contexts like posters, packaging, and display type.

Wrong Quotation Marks

Straight vertical tick marks (") are not quotation marks. Curly quotation marks (" ") are. This matters especially in print work where the difference is clearly visible. Most software autocorrects to curly marks, but it fails in cases like 'twas or dimensions (6" = 6 inches, not 6 inches with quotation marks).

I audit every piece of text for quotation mark accuracy before finalizing. It takes two minutes and is always worth doing.

Incorrect Apostrophes

Same issue, smaller mark. The apostrophe in "don't" should curve the right way ('). Straight apostrophes are typewriter artifacts. When they appear in polished print work, they signal careless typesetting.

River Patterns in Justified Text

Justified text can create visual "rivers" — columns of white space that flow vertically through a paragraph, created by the spaces that were widened to achieve justified alignment. Rivers are a classic sign of insufficiently controlled justification.

Fixing rivers requires manually adjusting the tracking of specific lines, adjusting the word spacing parameters, or changing the line breaks to redistribute the problem text. It's detail work, but in any project where typography is a primary design element, it's necessary.

Inadequate Optical Margin Alignment

Punctuation and certain letterforms at the beginning or end of a text block should be allowed to hang slightly outside the text column — this is optical margin alignment. Without it, justified or aligned text appears to have slightly indented lines wherever punctuation appears at the column edge.

InDesign's Optical Margin Alignment handles this automatically. Enabling it transforms the edge of a text column from slightly irregular to visually smooth.

The Audit Habit

I've developed a typography audit habit: before finalizing any piece with significant body text, I zoom to 100% (actual size) and read through every paragraph looking for these issues. It takes extra time. It's always worth it.