In traditional printing terminology, a
Like centered text, bold or italic, and all caps, rules and borders are best used sparingly. Ask yourself: do you really need a rule or border to make a visual distinction? You can usually get equally good results by increasing the space above and below the text. Try that first.
For borders, set the thickness between half a point and one point. Thinner borders can work on professionally printed goods but are too fine to reproduce well on an office printer or computer screen. Thicker borders are counterproductive—they create noise that upstages the information inside. You want to see the data, not the lines around the data.
Wrong | Athos | Porthos | Aramis |
---|---|---|---|
Phone | (617) 555 1453 | (508) 555 3232 | (603) 555 8490 |
Cell | (617) 555 3145 | (508) 555 2323 | (603) 555 8491 |
Fax | (617) 555 5413 | (508) 555 4545 | (603) 555 8492 |
Right | Athos | Porthos | Aramis |
---|---|---|---|
Phone | (617) 555 1453 | (508) 555 3232 | (603) 555 8490 |
Cell | (617) 555 3145 | (508) 555 2323 | (603) 555 8491 |
Fax | (617) 555 5413 | (508) 555 4545 | (603) 555 8492 |
Similarly, don’t use patterned borders (i.e., anything other than a single solid line, like dots, dashes, or double lines). They’re unnecessarily complicated.
With rules, you have more latitude because they don’t accumulate the way borders do. If you want to make a rule thicker than one point or use a pattern, go ahead. But thick or patterned rules still wear out their welcome faster than the classic half-point solid rule.
borders
property. To get borders only between columns, set the border-left
property on the td+td
selector. To get borders only between rows, set the border-top
property on the tr+tr
selector.
Never make rules and borders out of repeated typographic characters, like punctuation, hyphens and dashes, or math symbols. Especially ridiculous is the habit in certain offices of using stacked parentheses to make a vertical line. Not only is it uglier than a vertical rule, it’s much harder to assemble. These are typewriter habits. They’re obsolete.
If you attach a rule to headings, try putting it above the heading (rather than below, which is usually the default). Then the rule will separate the end of the previous section and the current heading, instead of separating the current heading from its own section.