Stuff & Nonsense product and website design

Blog and all that malarkey

Typography is poetry (More on Typesetting The Waste Land)

Judging from the response from the people who attended, our first Visual Web Design Masterclass in London this month was a huge success. As a large part of the day was spent learning about typography, both relating to type and to layouts devised from typographic principles, I chose to illustrate the lessons by typesetting The Waste Land, a poem by TS. Eliot. If you weren't able to attend, now is your chance to take a look at the results of my experiments.

My self-set challenges were:

  • To base each layout on a different typographical or layout principle
  • To use the same structural XHTML markup for every part
  • To design all but the grid in the browser, not Fireworks or Photoshop

Start by learning about the poem or jump straight to each part below.


Written by Andy Clarke


More from Stuff & Nonsense

Andy Clarke demonstrates how to take your product and website designs to the next level.

Take your Squarespace designs to the next level with our premium Squarespace templates.

The popular web design contract template trusted by thousands of web designers and developers.

Andy is an experienced mentor who can help you improve your design skills and develop your career.


Hire me. I’m available now to work on product and website design projects.