Did I just hear you double space?

In these crazy, coronavirus times you’ve hopefully all joined me in working from home. How many of you are feeling some freedom now that you don’t have to walk by your favorite graphic designer on trip to the coffee maker? Maybe you think your Power Point is already perfect and there’s no need to bother them… or perhaps that sell sheet looks just fine in Word?

On the off-chance any of you are quietly nodding your heads, I thought I’d bring up the one thing I do with nearly all the copy that comes across my desk: I delete all of the extra spaces!

Oddly, this isn’t constrained to the spaces after a period, but also after bullets, or when you want to turn a line but not have a hard return (try shift+return), and really, they often turn up in places I’d never expect. It’s super easy to make this change (find/replace all “ “ with “ “), however! if you’re tempted to just-hit-send and you have a double spacing habit, your copy is going to be harder to read than necessary.

There are several theories as to the why of double spaces, I won’t go into them all. I’ll just say, we are on smart computers & phones using smart fonts and all that smartness means the space after a period has been designed into the characters of your font. So, let’s avoid using mono-spaced fonts (illustration on the top left) because: yuck. And try not adding in the extra space you can so easily see in the top center illustration. Let the font do the work for you and save that extra space!

Stay safe and sane and keep washing your hands,
Amy