In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.
The high-level page layout involves deciding on the overall arrangement of text and images, and possibly on the size or shape of the medium. These decisions require intelligence, sentience, and creativity on the part of the designer, and they are informed by culture, psychology, and what the document authors and editors wish to communicate and emphasize. Low-level pagination and typesetting are more mechanical processes. Given certain parameters such as boundaries of text areas, the typeface, and font size, justification preference can be done in a straightforward way. Until desktop publishing became dominant, these processes were still done by people, but in modern publishing, they are almost always automated. The result might be published as-is (as for a residential phone book interior) or it might be adjusted by a graphic designer (as for a highly polished, expensive publication).
