The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web (2005)
webtypography.net
webtypography.net
I don’t know whether this was a typographic faux pas or a defect in my particular copy.
I had to compare it to my other paperbacks, which were all made with ample center margins to account for the stiff binding. But they didn't look nearly as nice although not due to the center margins.
In fairness, the author (Robert Bringhurst) probably didn't have final say over the paperback, at least as it was bound in final form. The binding is just too stiff for the form factor which is unusually narrow and tall for a paperback.
There are less stiff paperback bindings. Dover used to produce paperbacks with pages stitched into signatures, but that was a more expensive binding.
He could have taken the book to a different publisher!
> In fairness, the author (Robert Bringhurst) probably didn't have final say over the paperback, at least as it was bound in final form.
I’m guessing he had a LOT of influence over the printing. The paper is extremely high quality, there’s red color type every so often, etc. If there’s any book where the author would control the printing, it’s this one.
I’m guessing he’s either optimizing for a mathematically or historically “correct” ratio over the reader experience, or we’re supposed to “break in” the book more before reading:
http://booksville.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-break-in-new-b...
I agree. My point is that the final, bound form is probably not available for approval. The author sees and approves pages before they are bound. He probably did not have a bound paperback in his hands until the first print run. Only then could you judge how the choice of center margin did not work with the other choices.
He may have had approval over the method of paperback binding, but a number of variables are conspiring to make the final spine stiff enough that the pages kind of disappear into the binding. Some of those were the variables the author apparently approved - the paper choice, the page dimensions, the margins.
I will add that the layout really looks like a hardback layout. I think that was forefront in the author's mind.
I think you’re right that it’s about it being the correct ratio and is intended to be broken in. The copy I had as a design student certainly was.
The typical rule is to have the inner margins that are half as wide as the outer margins, so that the two inner margins, being adjacent, visually add up to the same space as one outer margin. This is complicated by the fact that the inside of the pages are folded and vanish in the binding. In a well typeset book, this is compensated for by adding a “binding correction” to the width of the inner margins. The result is very aesthetically pleasing. It sounds like with your edition the typesetting was done independent of the binding, and hence didn’t properly account for constraints.
As some have pointed out, however, you have to be careful when translating rules from page to screen. For example, Jakob Nielsen was probably right when he said you just leave links alone, let them be blue and underlined. Typophiles especially hate to underline words. They will go through all sorts of acrobatics to decorate links any other way (bottom borders that don't touch the descender thingies on the letters g and y and so forth) or even background images of a line. Thankfully Chrome at least as started to support underlines that by default cross under those descenders.
Typophiles also don't care for colored text much and will likely try to color their links black if they could get away with it. Colored text reminds them of children with crayons or their mother making a flyer. Serious type is understated, like a little black dress.
I myself am a typophile and come from a background in studying fonts and all that before I got into web design. I have slowly come around to be more like Jakob Nielsen, and I prefer those low-brow unstyled sites by professors and old open-source projects over most "designed" sites these days. But I still prefer a nice serif over sans-serif, and a max-width of about 50em, thank you.
On another note, typographic layout is often concerned with long texts, take TeX for example, but that's not today's web.
I try to stay under 140 characters per paragraph to limit myself. Feels like Knuth optimizing page breaks.
For example, on the landing page the navigation links are on the bottom right, which requires a large eye/mouse movement from the "origin" (top left) where the title is.
It's worth noting the project this site turned into: a book called Web Typography. It has its own subdomain at http://book.webtypography.net and it looks markedly more modern and responsive.
Genius, that guy.