My two cents:

I find align taxa labels is very aesthetically pleasing and tend to use the horizontal orientation. I find the (usually default) forked tree looks best in larger trees with lots of tips. I also would not bother trying to make the labels legible. Use colors, such as lightly tinted boxes around the taxa names, to call attention to taxa or groups of interest. I also use colored circles on the nodes/branches w/relevant levels of support. Everything to make it easier to see the main points of the tree without having to think about it or try and read (almost always illegible) names.

While working with phylogeny, the names of the taxa can be minimized using accession number/ID number to make it aesthetic. Further, representing depends on the type of presentation (conference/journal/etc). Use default options to fit the tree legibly.

I agree with the above horizontal presentation (people find it easier to read text as it is normally presented versus vertical or slanted) and the use of color coding (can be applied to taxa names and brackets). For a general audience you may want to use several images zooming in on the group of interest (e.g., a tree of the main gnathostomes, then one of main groups of osteichthyans, and then a final more detailed one). For the layperson, it also helps to have adjacent images of representative taxa.