WEBVTT

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One of the other tools you have in your toolbox
for making visual design is alignment.
So, let's see how you can use this in order to help you
help the user achieve things.
So, first of all, let's think about text. Now, what I'm going to do is assume
that I'm an English speaker and I'm an English writer.
And so, I have a left-to-right text that I use.

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I'm also learning a bit of Welsh. And Welsh also is a left-to-right language, as are most European languages.
If you come from a language which is the other way round,
or if your users' are right-to-left languages, then you need to flip
everything I say for the next slide or two the other way round as well.
So, being aware of your users is absolutely crucial here.
But I am going to assume left to right. So, for left-to-right text,
then you normally want to align things to the left.

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And this is the most common. You'll have seen this in many, many layouts.
So, the reason for that, though,
is that if you're scanning text, you read left to right,
and therefore you want your eyes to go down and very rapidly
move down the left-hand side of that text and scan the beginning.
This is partly driven by the fact, too, that you distinguish that beginning bit first.
There may be contexts where the end of a sentence or the end of a title

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is the most critical bit. So, you might want to reverse this.
So, again, think purpose. Why is somebody looking at this line of text items?
And if what they're trying to do is scan something and if what they'd like you to distinguish,
which is the most common case, is the front of the text, then you left-align.
It does tend to be a bit boring sometimes. So, you might want to mix it up.
But if you do, and if you right-align – and I
have used right-aligned text; there's occasions I've used it –

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you have to know that makes quick scanning to find something more difficult.
However, there might be... if the context is
somebody knows the name of a film and they're trying to find it
in order to choose it, and they want to do that quickly because it's about to start in a few minutes
and it's a live film,
you want to make that as easy to scan as possible.
However, perhaps if you're just making new suggestions of films to the user
and the user doesn't necessarily recognize them straight away
– so, what you're doing: it's a range of things they're looking at – then it may not matter as much

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whether they're left-aligned, right-aligned,
or maybe center-aligned in the middle.
So, there are times for special effects when you want to do that.
But you have to understand then that a particular purpose, which is scanning
to find something that you recognize is going to be harder.