Alignment
Algning text in justified, centered, or ragged columns reflects the basic architecture of typography. Choose an alignment style that suits the structure of your website and character of the individual content elements. Each mode of alignement comes with advantages and disadvantages. Centered type is graceful and elegant but can appear old-fashioned; in addition, it can be difficult to align with other elements. However, centered type can work well within bounded, defined space of a button or menue bar. Justified type will have ugly gaps if it's not hyphenated correctly, and hypenation can be hard to handle online.
Owing to the felixible, customizable character of web text, designers can't spend endless hours adjusting the rag along the edge of a column or creating a justified block with no rivers or holes. Flush-left alignment is therfore the most common text setting on the web (whereas justified remaines the dominent setting for print). Flushg-left text works well in most extended reading enviroments, especially where columns are quite narrow, as on a news site. The ragged edge opens up space between the columns because most lines fall short of the full measure, resulting in a more spacious overall composition.
*This is an interactive example to allow you to test alignment yourself.
