centered textIt’s boring—
use sparingly

Cen­tered text is overused. It’s the ty­po­graphic equiv­a­lent of vanilla ice cream—safe but bor­ing. It’s rare to see text cen­tered in a book, news­pa­per, or mag­a­zine, ex­cept for the oc­ca­sional head­line or ti­tle. Asym­me­try is noth­ing to fear.

Yet it is feared. So for all the fans of cen­tered text, a poem:

An Ode to Cen­tered Text

Cen­tered text is ac­cept­able when used for short phrases or ti­tles,
like the name on your busi­ness cards or let­ter­head.
Or in doc­u­ments, you can cen­ter ma­jor sec­tion head­ings
like “In­tro­duc­tion”, “Ar­gu­ment”, and “Con­clu­sion”.
(It may be con­ven­tional in your ju­ris­dic­tion
to cen­ter cer­tain text in court fil­ings.)
If you en­joy cen­ter­ing text, then
you should learn to use the
hard line break
so your lines start
in sen­si­ble
places.
OK?

Whole text blocks, in­clud­ing sen­tence-length head­ings in court fil­ings, should not be cen­tered. Cen­ter­ing makes text blocks dif­fi­cult to read be­cause both edges of the text block are un­even. Cen­tered text blocks are also dif­fi­cult to align with other page el­e­ments. See head­ings for bet­ter options.

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