Eleanor Voss

I set type for books for nine years — literary fiction mostly, some poetry, one cookbook I still have nightmares about. Then the books stopped being paper and I followed them onto screens, where all the same problems exist and almost none of the same craft.

Marginalia started in 2019 as notes to myself about what carried over. It turned into essays, then interviews with people who know more than I do, and somewhere along the way 4,000 people started reading it. The subject is still the same: how people actually read, and how to build things that get out of the way.

Selected pieces

• The comfortable measure, and why every redesign forgets it — the one to start with
• Marginal notes: the oldest interface we have — where the blog's name comes from
• Dark mode is not an inversion — the most-argued-with
• Ten years typesetting other people's books — an interview with Ade Mensah

Elsewhere

I work three days a week with a small studio on reading software, and one day a week teaching typography to people who code. The fifth day is this.

Occasionally I take on a book. If it's fiction and the publisher will let me argue about the margins, write to me.

Colophon

This site is plain HTML and one stylesheet, no build step, no JavaScript. The typeface is whatever serif your system has — Iowan Old Style on Apple devices, Palatino or Georgia elsewhere — at 18 pixels and a 40-rem measure. The notes in the margin are <aside> elements positioned absolutely on wide screens and inline on narrow ones.