Sustainable Typographic Composition System
An experimental typography project, in which the unnecessary whitespace in mass-market novel publications is evaluated, with a new composition system developed in order to reduce this whitespace, thus making typography and production within this market more environmentally sustainable.
In a world in which protection of natural resources has become a priority for many, the pulp consumption by publishers with huge catalogues of fiction is still high. Whilst the actual trees harvested for the pulp is sustainable, due to the annual demand on these finite pulp resources, prices can fluctuate to the point of being untenable for smaller publishing houses.
Although Jan Tschichold’s Composition Rules (1947) are still used to format the content of (almost) all fiction publications, these standardised typographical composition rules being functional, aesthetic and widely accepted as orthodoxy, when weighed against contemporary environmental values, these composition rules are arguably unsustainable (in the context of number of trees used to produce these novels).
Composition Solution
A typographical composition solution to 1) reduce the amount of whitespace in mass publishing, whilst retaining legibility and aesthetics, 2) create a set of composition rules that take into account contemporary environmental issues. The typographic solution comprises of a set of glyphs which replace traditional line and paragraph breaks, as well as introducing new composition formatting. Additionally, there is a set of 8 new combined punctuation marks for dialogue within the body of text.
