Whether we view design as ‘creating with existing means’ or not, upon closer inspection, design has always been about constantly arranging things, and not just since the advent of computers. The ongoing alignment of shapes, images, letters with one another and within their surface. Compositional spaces or their amplifiers, such as grids, can also be seen as registers of response. To the questions the design willingly or unwillingly might need to respond to. And in this respect, too, the artboard extends far beyond the immediate surface into the problem definition, the historical and social context, the budget and time constraints, taste, and all other design premises or sudden contingencies.

In typography *justification *has a fairly literal meaning: to justify text means to align it so that both the left and right edges of each line are straight and flush with the margins, creating a uniform look. This is done by increasing and lowering the amount of space between words and letters to stretch each line to the full width of the paragraph. Space, we now take as given, but that has not always been there. Word spacing in fact was first introduced in the 7th century in clerical latin texts and only in the 11th century these aerated composition of text became canonical. Swipe: One of the most remarkable aspects of Plato’s Politeia (The Republic), in which the utopia of an ideal state is discussed over ten books (and in which we find many of Plato’s best-known concepts and quotations, from philosopher kings to the banishment of poets and finally the allegory of the cave), is its introduction: A group of slightly squiffy gentlemen (Socrates, Glaucon, Adeimantus, Thrasymachus and some listeners) stroll home from a party in the evening and begin their entire conversation with the question: What is justice?