/ˈmɑːr.dʒɪn/

Margin

noun · typography & page layout

What it is

Margins are the frame that holds the page together. A page has four — head (top), foot (bottom), inner (toward the spine), and outer (toward the fore-edge) — and classical practice rarely makes them equal. The traditional progression sets the inner margin smallest, then head, then outer, then foot largest, so the text block sits slightly high and toward the spine, where the eye expects it. The result looks balanced even though the four bands differ.

Margins are not wasted space. They give the hand somewhere to hold the page without covering type, give the eye a rest at the end of each line, and absorb the small inaccuracies of trimming and binding. Together with the gutter, margins define the live area within which the typographic grid is constructed.

Etymology

From the Latin margo ("edge, border"), the term has named the border of a written page since the manuscript era, when scribes ruled generous margins for commentary and correction. Jan Tschichold revived the medieval and Renaissance margin proportions — including the Van de Graaf canon of page construction — in his essays collected as The Form of the Book (1991), arguing that the classical ratios still produce the most harmonious pages.

Examples in use

"Increase the foot margin so the folio doesn't crowd the last line of text." A designer preparing a paperback widens the inner margins to account for the deep gutter of perfect binding. In CSS, the margin property names the same idea — the transparent space outside an element's border that separates it from its neighbours and the viewport edge.