The first section of the manual for the LaTeX Memoir class used to be an extended essay on book design and not at all LaTeX specific. I'm not entirely sure why the author removed it, but here's a link[1][large PDF] to a version with the section intact. If you're looking for more extended look at the concepts in the OP, check it out.<p>[1]: <a href="http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/localdoc/memman.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/localdoc/memman.pdf</a>
When I learnt about this in design school, I went ahead and created a quick and dirty web app that'd construct the canon for me, instead of having to draw a bunch of geometry on paper. Here are the links to [1] the app, [2] the blog post, and [3] the source code.<p>[1]: <a href="http://vandegraaf.azuretalon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://vandegraaf.azuretalon.com/</a>
[2]: <a href="http://kswizz.com/post/3024765786/van-de-graaf" rel="nofollow">http://kswizz.com/post/3024765786/van-de-graaf</a>
[3]: <a href="https://github.com/kballenegger/Van-De-Graaf-Generator" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kballenegger/Van-De-Graaf-Generator</a>
I like how it comes out when there is writing in the margins or the in the magazine example, but for a pure textblock it just seems to be a huge amount of wasted space at the bottom of the page and even on the sides.
Shameless plug - one of the reference articles was my blog piece on Canons of Layout. <a href="http://51elliot.blogspot.com/2009/12/canons-of-layout.html" rel="nofollow">http://51elliot.blogspot.com/2009/12/canons-of-layout.html</a><p>Grid systems have really helped the layout issue since then, although none of the ones in current use seem to be based on the golden mean.
This is surreal! I'm a designer and I had a brainwave yesterday ”I wonder if I could apply classical page layout I learned for print design to web“ and my web history from yesterday included this very page!<p>I tried to implement some of this in CSS, but here are the issues I had with it:<p>- there aren't left and right pages on web, so margins should be equal. Classical page layout means that the left margin, right margin, and the gap between the two pages is equal.<p>- there's no comfortable way to control line length in a fluid responsive layout, unless you have really obvious breakpoints.<p>- because long documents aren't broken into pages, the bottom part of the page runs off the bottom of the screen so there's not even a concept of page length on web<p>I still have more thinking to do, and so far I think the site that has done this best so far is medium.com