2025
Editorial
A quarterly print series redrawn around a single measure and a strict baseline.
Details
Northwind publishes long essays with very little imagery, so the grid carries the whole reading experience. We reset the series on one measure and a baseline that holds across footnotes, pull quotes and plates, which let the press typeset an issue in days rather than weeks.
Client
Northwind Press
year
2025
Approach
One measure, one baseline
One measure. One baseline. Everything else earns its place.
Footnotes, captions and running heads were all pulled onto the same rhythm, so a spread never has to be nudged by hand.
The measure was set at 62 characters and never moved again. Everything that might once have been a judgement call — a sunk initial, a plate caption, a two-line epigraph — became a position on the baseline instead.
Long essays are mostly texture. A reader never notices a grid working, but they feel it the moment it slips, usually as fatigue twenty pages in rather than as a complaint about the design.
We kept one deliberate exception. Plates break the measure and run full width, because an image that obeys the text block stops being evidence and starts being decoration.
My Process
Research
We read four back issues and logged every typographic decision. Most were one-offs made under deadline, which is why no two spreads agreed with each other.
Brainstorming
The question was how little we could specify and still hold a 90-page essay together. We landed on one measure and one baseline, with everything else derived from them.
Typesetting
Footnotes, captions, pull quotes and running heads were all pulled onto the same rhythm. A spread now composes without anyone nudging it by hand.
Proofing
Two full issues were set on the new system before handover, with the press typesetter driving. Where they reached for a manual override, we fixed the rule instead.
Result
Four issues, set in-house
Four issues produced on the new system, with typesetting time down by roughly two thirds.
The press now sets issues in-house without design oversight.
The first issue took eleven days and the fourth took three. Most of that came from decisions that no longer had to be made — the system had already made them, in a way an editor could defend to a contributor.
A nine-page specification sits alongside the templates. It is written for an editor rather than a designer, which is the only reason anyone reads it.
Two contributors have since asked for the measure to use in their own typesetting. That is the clearest evidence we have that it holds.
