In the Center?

This post is about text styles and certainly not meant to criticize what anyone chooses to use on his/her blog site. That choice is most definitely yours. Apologies if anyone becomes offended. 

To center or not, that is the question, and it has nothing to do with Shakespeare.

It has everything to do with readability and the way our brain is used to reading.

3 Types of text alignment

Recently, it seems that many folks have adopted a centered text alignment for blog posts. Perhaps they consider this style as more contemporary or artsy?

In truth, it's neither. While I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this choice, it makes posts more difficult to read.

Centered text is more difficult to read when there's multiple lines of text as in long text paragraphs. That's because it forces the reader to make additional eye movements on both sides of the content. This can cause unnecessary eye fatigue, decrease reading speed and result in lower reading focus.

Why?

Because centering paragraph text anywhere, except in certain cases, makes the brain work harder to process what its reading because most of us learned to read books left to right from an early age. English is read as a left-to-right language. Scanning text that's centered or flush right is more difficult to read.

Left-aligned text typically results in much better content readability. And, it's why why newspapers, magazine articles and books are presented this way. Left-aligned text avoids unnecessary eye jumps which makes the copy much easier to follow. 

Would you continue reading something for pleasure if the text was all centered?

The default alignment for most reading text is left aligned text. It's not a random choice. Most writing follows this format. Left-aligned text is easier to read because of the way our eyes scan a page. Eye tracking research has shown that readers scan sites in a what's called the F-shape pattern.

It results in much better content readability, which is why books, magazine articles and newspapers use this style. Left-aligned text helps to avoid unnecessary eye jumps, making the whole copy much easier to follow.

What is the F-Shape Pattern?

F-Shape Pattern

The F-Pattern describes the most common user eye-scanning patterns when it comes to blocks of content. In this context, F means fast. That's how users read content on the web. In a few seconds, their eyes move quickly across a page.

Analysis have shown that people usually read the first few lines of content while looking for what they need. Then, they scan the lower portion of the page until deciding what to do next. 

People first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This eye movement forms the top of the F. Then, they move down the page looking for areas of interest. When something interests them, they read it and the eye movement forms the second horizontal line of the letter F. This second line usually covers a shorter area than the previous one.

Centered text is best used for some headlines (one or two lines long) and short lines of text, like quotes, poems, or slogans. People can read these easier as lines are short, scannable and don't require repeated eye movements. 

My preference is for left-aligned text using a sans serif font, which describes a font where the individual characters don't have serifs (tails and other ornaments). 

Previously, my font choice was Arial, a popular sans serif font. Arial is designed primarily for print use, and also makes a good web font because of its openness. A similar font, Helvetica, is also veery similar. Recently, I've recently been experimenting with a couple of different type fonts, which may have been more difficult to read on certain browsers or mobile decides.

This font, Times New Roman, (a serif font) is considered one of the easiest fonts to read and has long been standard for print and web documents because it's simple and straightforward and extremely legible at a wide variety of sizes, as well as in bold, italics, and headings. Despite its relatively small x-height (X-height refers to the height of the lowercase x for a typeface). 

Your Turn — which text alignment style do you use and why?