Learning typography, one page at a time

My first book layout taught me more about typography than any lecture. Several hundred pages, chapters and sections, footnotes, quotes and running heads: suddenly every decision repeated itself a thousand times.

I learned to set a type area with proportion, to give a page an even grey, to tame widows, orphans and rivers, and to let a hierarchy carry the reader without shouting. The details nobody notices are exactly the ones that make a book easy to read, and they still shape how I design interfaces today.