Optical alignment
Aligning elements by how they look rather than where their bounding boxes sit — letting round glyphs, punctuation, and icons overshoot the edge so the result reads straight.
Example usage
“Hang the opening quote into the margin; the paragraph should look flush, not measure flush.”
Editor’s note
The bounding box is a polite fiction. A circle set mathematically level with a square appears to float; a triangular play icon centered in its button reads left of center. Trust the squint, not the inspector — when a design feels subtly off and nobody can say why, mismeasured “correctness” is usually the culprit. Geometry proposes; the eye disposes.