Optical alignment - Misplaced notions and outrage assumptions in the internet age.

You’ll see these posts from time to time, they’ll take a logo or app icon from a large brand, draw centre lines across them, then gleefully tweet about how “big company make dumb mistake lol” because the image doesn’t line up. Maybe they’ll use it as some justification as to how “the past was better”, or how real art and design are DEAD.

Chances are, despite what their account says, they’ve never studied a day of design in their life. If they had they’d know the difference between optical alignment and mathematical/measured alignment.

Optical alignment is what many of these logos and icons will be using, because the human eye perceives balance in certain ways owing to the fact we are not computers, we subconsciously account for the impact negative space has on the weight certain elements might hold, our propensity to scan an image too to bottom impacts our perception of that image.

You can test this yourself easily enough, take a word like “walk” and type it up in photoshop or some such program. Convert it to outlines/rasterise it to remove the text box. Now centre align that to your canvas. Theres s good chance, somewhat dependant on font and size, that it looks unbalanced. This is because the stems/arms of the W extend further than any other letter but on their left side sit in empty space. Your program is mathematically aligning to the very tip of that Ws left arm, leaving the bulk of the words weight sitting a touch too far to the right.

Designers correct for this with optical alignment, and some text programs nowadays have it as an option to automatically adjust all the text in a given box. It’s a common and necessary practice, much like drawing a human face with perfect symmetry looks wrong to us, mathematically aligning everything sets of a subconscious note of imbalance in our perception.

So why am I going on about this? It’s hardly the most pressing of points right? But you see I think it is indicative of a lot of our issues with online discourse at present. People are willing to present anything in the most negative of lights for engagement, even if they’ve fundamentally misunderstood or wilfully ignored the truth of the matter.

Companies spend billions on understanding how we perceive things, and for centuries artists and designers have made study of the creation and perception of the visual. We underestimate both the machinations of the greedy and villainous, and ignore the lessons of perception and creations power, all for a smug self satisfied “see their stupid” comment on some post.

By refusing to dig deeper and ask “why” We play our part, we see lines on an image, clearly “showing” that the marks been missed and we never stop to question whether it is actually us who are missing the point.