The Golden Canon

Jan Tschichold, the legendary typographer and book designer, described the Golden Canon as a method to produce the perfect book.

A page in the perfect book should be overlaid, notionally, with a 9 x 9 grid so that the width is made up of 9 rows of 9 equal rectangles and the height is made up of 9 rows of 9 equal rectangles.

On a recto page the textblock is then positioned 1/9th from the top and the inside of the page and 2/9th from the outside and bottom of the page. The positioning is reversed on a verso page.

The ratio of the grid is then 2:3. There is harmony because the height of the textblock equals the width of the page.

I had to design a range of bullet point booklets, on the subject of UK employment law, for Worklaw, a company which advises employers. It occurred to me that such a boring topic might be more readable if the booklets were designed to follow the Golden Canon.

The booklets are 6 by 9 inches. I did not change the font from Computer Modern which can look fine in non-fiction.

Below, is the LaTeX code to print two pages of one of the booklets.

\documentclass[twoside,openany]{book}
%\usepackage{showframe}
\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage[paperwidth=6in, paperheight=9in, top=1in,
outer=2in, bottom=2in, inner=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}
\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\usepackage{xspace}
\setlist{nosep}
\setlist[itemize]{leftmargin=*}
\setlist[enumerate]{leftmargin=*}
\begin{document}
\newpage
\section*{Defending}
To defend a claim to an employment tribunal you need to fill
out the response form (an ET3) and then organise the following: 
\begin{itemize}
\item relevant documents;
\item written statements from any witnesses. 
\end{itemize}
That’s it!\\
The rest of it is knowing a bit about how an employment
tribunal operates. 
\subsection*{Relevant documents}
As a general rule, employment tribunals regard documents made
at the time of the event in question (a contemporaneous
document) as more reliable than what a witness says in
evidence, particularly if the witness did not write their
witness statement until many months after the event.
As soon as an employer knows or suspects that they might face a
claim to an employment tribunal they should collect together
anything in writing, both 	printed and electronic, which might
be relevant, including handwritten documents which have been
typed up (they should keep both the original handwritten
document and the typed copy).\\ 
Some claims have few relevant documents, but the following will
still be relevant: 
\begin{itemize}
\item the employee’s employment contract;
\item the company’s written disciplinary procedure;
\item previous disciplinary documents, if any. 
\end{itemize}
Other cases might involve hundreds of investigation documents. 
\section*{Witness statements}
It follows from the above that a witness should write up a
statement of what they saw or heard.\\
Employment tribunals used to be called industrial tribunals.\\ 
Previously, an employment tribunal comprised an employment
judge and 2 lay persons (\emph{lay person} meaning a person who
is not a lawyer).\\
Nowadays, most cases in an employment tribunal are decided by
an employment judge sitting alone.\\ 
However, some cases still require 2 lay persons in addition to
the employment judge. For example, discrimination cases and
\emph{whistleblowing} cases are heard by a judge and 2 lay
persons. The lay persons are an employee (often a member a
trade union) and an employer (often a member of an employer's
organisation such as The Federation of Small Businesses).\\ 
Employment tribunal procedure is designed to be less
intimidating than in a court. For example, witnesses give
evidence sitting at a table instead of standing in a witness
box. However, employment tribunals have strict procedural rules
with which both parties must comply. In particular, time limits
laid down by the tribunal must be adhered to otherwise the
party in default risks their case being dismissed and judgment
given in favour of the other party.\\ 
To keep this booklet as simple as possible we will assume that
the parties comply with all time limits laid down by the
tribunal, and that it is not necessary to consider such matters
as \emph{unless orders}, \emph{strike-out applications}, etc.
If any such matters do arise then the affected party should
take professional advice as a matter of urgency. 
\end{document}

I have a confession to make: the client said a purchaser might think they were being sold too much white space so I had to change the geometry to:

top=1in, outer=1.333in, bottom=2in, inner=1in.

Although based on a modified version of the Golden Canon, the design still looks good and the print versions outsell the ebook versions.