The book
The PagePerfect Journal
Twenty-three essays on typography, layout and the printed page.
Every essay from this journal, corrected sentence by sentence and set as one book on the Van de Graaf canon the essays describe: 6 by 9 inches, a serif text face, a baseline grid, indented paragraphs, no widows. It is typeset by the same engine that once powered PagePerfect, and delivered as a PDF you can read on any screen or print.
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Contents
Typography
- The ROI of Legibility: Where Swiss Precision Meets Madison Avenue Profits
- The 40-Character Column: Reading Gravity and the Economics of Attention
- Reverse Type is Dead: The Empirical Case Against White-on-Black Body Copy
- The Paragraph Indent: Five Centuries of Evidence Against the Line Space
- The Optical Margin: Why Mathematical Alignment Looks Crooked
- Rivers of White: The Cognitive Cost of Full Justification
Layout
- The Ogilvy Layout on a Modular Grid: Structuring the Visual-Headline-Copy Sequence
- The Psychology of White Space: Giving the Skim-Reader Room to Breathe (and Buy)
- The Geometry of Authority: How Mathematical Page Proportions Build Trust Before a Word Is Read
- Widows, Orphans, and the Cost of the Ragged Bottom
- The Binding Margin: How Physical Books Punish Bad Geometry
Visual Communication
Design Systems
Conversion
- Semantics of the Serif: Why Conversion Copywriters Demand Traditional Typefaces for Body Copy
- Captions Sell: Designing for the Most Read Element on the Page
- The False Economy of the Software Default
- The Print-Ready Manuscript: A Technical Guide to PDF/X, Bleed, and Colour Compliance
- The Gutenberg Gap: Why Modern Web Engines Still Struggle with the Printed Page
Every essay is also free to read on this site. The book is for people who would rather have the set on paper or in one file, and who want to support the journal.