Design and typography at Salt

Christopher Hamilton-Emery
Designer, Salt

Design as the soul of Salt

Design has always been at the heart of Salt’s publishing identity. From the outset, we’ve always understood typography to be both form and function (something every designer knows) – a way of shaping how readers experience literature (and especially poetry). In many respects, the experience of reading ought to go unnoticed, nothing should interfere with the text. As soon as we notice the typography, something is wrong.

However, to succeed in this, many elements need to balance: the font, the leading, the layout, the dimensions of the page, the gauge and the hierarchies of information. Every Salt book carries this philosophy – that design should serve both beauty and clarity, and that the reader’s eye deserves the same care as the writer’s line.

Foundations: Leeds and the early years of digital design (1983–1993)

My adult design education began at Leeds Polytechnic back in the Dark Ages, I mean 1983, where I was taught to see typography as structure – the invisible grid beneath meaning. My tuition preceded the development of Desktop Publishing, we worked with type scale rulers and moveable type, layout pads, Rotring isograph pens, Letraset, Pantone pens, and white Formica drawing boards with sliding bars. I still have my points and picas ruler from those days here in front of me.

Image © Tangerineduel – Diagonal side view of Fully Adjustable Cedar Board Drawing Board. [CC BY-SA 4.0].

Those years established a lifelong respect for craft, composition, and print. In the early 1990s, while working in public transport as an information designer, I set up a design studio with my first Macintosh, and began using digital tools – QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and Photoshop – then in their infancy. It was the beginning of my fascination with computers and systems, with how words, numbers, and images could be organised to guide people clearly and effectively. However, setting up LocalTalk networks sucked. But so began my fascination with technology.

Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Public transport and corporate systems: information and communication (1990–1994)

Between Leeds and Cambridge, my working life shifted from education into practice, and I found myself learning two very different but equally useful lessons about design: how to design information and how to design brands.

Alan Sansbury from Liverpool, England. GM Buses | CC BY 2.0.

From 1990 to 1993, I was Designer for GM Buses in Manchester, responsible for designing all communications material for the city’s principal public transport operation. This was my real introduction to information design. Timetables, route maps, posters, on-bus notices and service updates all had to be clear, fast to read and impossible to misunderstand. People didn’t admire these designs – they relied on them. Typography here wasn’t about style but about function, hierarchy and speed. If the information failed, so did the service.

Speaking of GM Buses – where I also learned a lot about copywriting from Angela Poole – I remember looking at the company’s logotype, rendered in the Crillee typeface, an old Letraset font, and thinking, ‘Who on Earth would have chosen this?’ Later in my career, it reappeared – it’s the font used by Gardners, the UK’s largest book wholesaler, for its marque. Now you know.

These were the QuarkXpress years, the years of DTP – when clients thought the software did all the work. The years when software innovation radically altered working practices in every print and design studio in the country. Hot metal was dead, the skills of the compositors' room lost. Typesetting had been democratised, but many had no idea of the skills needed to analyse content and present it with consistency or beauty. It was the era of both terrible design and huge innovation. But for those of us who had studied typography and design it was liberating and, with buggy software and clunky features and constraints, it was challenging, too. 

It also turns out that some of my work on coving panels, posters and timetables, has taken on a second life; they are now collectables, and so-called ‘gricers’ (dedicated transport enthusiasts, for the uninitiated) will apparently part with actual money for them. There are probably worse legacies. 

 

 

In 1993, I joined the British Council, initially as Studio Manager and later as Design Manager, responsible for global corporate identity and the provision of design services across Manchester and London. If GM Buses taught me how design informs people, the British Council taught me how design speaks for institutions. Here, the focus shifted to corporate and cultural communication – how an organisation presents itself, holds together visually, and expresses authority across countries and cultures.

This was also where I ran my first design team, managing designers, setting standards and maintaining consistency across a wide range of international communications. During this time, I also sat on the Council of the Chartered Society of Designers, and became obsessed with design management as a profession, retraining in the discipline. And it was here at The British Council that my publishing life began – producing course books for English Language Teaching.

Also, the British Council office in Medlock Street, Manchester, was the most beautiful building I have ever worked in. There are so few images of the old place, now demolished and replaced by HOME, student flats and restaurants. 

Together, these two roles formed an important bridge: one rooted in precision and public clarity, the other in identity and cultural voice. By the time I arrived at Cambridge University Press, I already understood typography as both system and communication – a foundation that Cambridge would deepen and formalise. 

Cambridge and the discipline of typography (1993–2003)

My time at the British Council, and later at Cambridge University Press, refined my understanding of typography as both craft and philosophy. At CUP, I worked alongside some of Britain’s most accomplished designers and production specialists, developing large-scale publishing programmes that demanded consistency, clarity, and precision. We worked with grid systems and Composition Specifications; we explored the legacy of Stanley Morison himself – whose legacy still shaped the Press’s aesthetic.

Folio Bible patented by the Cambridge University Press in 1763, Baskerville brought his own press to the university to complete his printing (Source: Typefaces for Books).

Cambridge’s typographic heritage runs deep. John Baskerville, the eighteenth-century type-founder and printer, set new standards for elegance and legibility, his eponymous typeface becoming synonymous with refinement. CUP’s long association with Monotype carried that legacy forward, notably through its collaboration with Morison, who served as typographic adviser to both organisations. Morison’s scholarship and his advocacy for order and readability – epitomised in The Times New Roman project – helped define twentieth-century publishing design.

And then there was John Trevitt, who preceded my time at CUP – its Art & Design Director for what must have been thirty-six years. I have Trevitt's author guideline for the Press, Book Design, published in 1980, written before the digital revolution, and it remains a fascinating document of its period.

During my years at CUP, the organisation was itself undergoing transition. In the early 2000s, an extensive design review was led by Geoff Staff, explored how the Press might renew its visual identity and production standards. I watched closely, learning how a major publisher could evolve while protecting its design heritage. At the same time, CUP’s Printing Division was pioneering an SGML-based typesetting system to produce complex journal pages for learned societies – integrating footnotes, endnotes, and sidebars through in-house software development managed by a small programming team. There was a lively debate about whether to migrate to 3B2, at that time a sophisticated page make-up system widely used in technical publishing, yet within the Publishing Division, we remained committed to QuarkXPress for book production for many years.

Geoff’s design review led to a range of grid based templates for cover and text design, a new logotype, and the adoption of Lexicon, designed by Bram de Does, as the Press’s principle text font. 

Those years taught me a great deal. They revealed the tension between innovation and tradition – between the human hand of design and the efficiency of automation. It was a lesson I carried directly into Salt: that the craft of typography must evolve with technology but never surrender its discipline.

It was also during this period that I met typographers such as Erik Spiekermann and Gerard Unger, whose ideas about legibility and rhythm profoundly influenced my later work. Unger’s Swift, designed in 1985 and revised in 1995, became Salt’s first house typeface – purchased directly from the designer. It embodied the qualities we sought back in 1999: clarity, humanity, and modernity. Its adoption marked the beginning of Salt’s long obsession with typography.

A side note here, it was while working at Cambridge University Press that I got involved in the development of Cambridge Mark-Up Language – long abandoned, this was an XML schema developed by Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd – highly-flexible, very pure, very granular, the mark-up was both light but extremely challenging in its implementation, driven by limitless values for content types, designed to be able to sell text fragments, and to format searchable text elements from the entire corpora of Cambridge content, and deliver it to readers in an instantly rendered form.

The challenge came in rolling out an XSLT transformation to typeset this material – and our developer, Jeni Tennison, came very close to doing this, allowing the entire corpus to be typeset instantaneously through XSLT and an encoding of Cambridge series and standard designs. In the early years of Salt, we attempted to deploy this technique.

The Hamilton-Emery design partnership (2010–2021)

From 2010 until 2021, I ran my own design consultancy, trading as The Cover Factory – working for a wide range of publishing clients including: Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Kogan Page, Muswell Press, Oxygen Books, The Policy Press, Polity, and Taylor and Francis Books, to name a few. I designed hundreds of covers – even corporate websites, theatre posters, signage and catalogues – it was a time of great personal growth, and every client brought fresh experiences of design standards and fonts, grids and, er, file-naming conventions, delivery folder hierarchies, FTP logins. Each commission enhanced my skills in book design – all of which impacted my work with my most significant client to date: Salt.

Founding Salt: systems, grids and the first house typeface (1999–2005)

Source: WikiCommons.

When Salt began, it naturally inherited this discipline. Everything was done in-house. We created highly formalised production systems and series designs, drawing on XML and XSLT to structure text and automate layout. We explored the Van de Graaf canon, popularised by Jan Tschichold – the influence of academic publishing was everywhere – restrained, symmetrical, and legible. Our first poetry collections were built on typographic order – and though Hart’s Rules was more an instinct than a manual at that stage, it already guided our sense of consistency, legibility, balance and beauty.

Systems and series: order and adaptation (1999–2005)

In those early days, the lessons I’d learned at Cambridge shaped a highly systematic approach to book production. Everything was built on structure. We developed stylesheet-driven templates for text design, precise layout specifications, and cover templates that could be applied consistently across whole series. Every book shared a family resemblance, each element serving the ideal of typographic economy and coherence. It fed into a commercial strategy that focused on output and direct sales.

Yet commercial realities soon began to exert their own pressures. Around this time, Jen paid a visit to a Bookmark Spalding, repping the list – and received some invaluable, if unwelcome, advice: ‘All these books look like academic textbooks. Who on Earth would buy them?’ And this frank feedback led to a complete change of direction for the Press.

As Salt moved further into trade publishing, uniformity became a major limitation. Throughout 2005, we’d gradually abandoned the strict series design of our developing list, recognising that each book really did need a more individual visual presence to compete in the marketplace. At first, we were nervous of the additional design burden this would bring, but we soon came to understand that we were about to change from a quasi-academic poetry publisher to a boutique trade publisher. And along with this change, came a new direction in our commissioning strategy and the beginnings of our fiction publishing.

Series design never disappeared, though – it evolved. Today, it thrives again in our flagship Salt Modern Stories list, which celebrates the short story form through elegant, deliberately cohesive design. The books are A-format paperbacks, typeset in Granjon, designed by George W. Jones for Linotype in 1924 and itself inspired by the sixteenth-century types of Robert Granjon and Claude Garamond. This choice of face – warm, vigorous, steeped in tradition – echoes the spirit of classic Picador fiction in its heyday, aligning Salt’s modern short-story publishing with the enduring pleasures of literary design.

Some Salt covers have also become acts of homage – quiet conversations with the history of book design. This is especially evident in our collaborations with Nicholas Royle, whose memoirs about books and bookselling explore that same lineage of visual and textual passion. These subtle allusions remind me that design is never created in isolation; it’s always in dialogue with what’s come before.

A typographic timeline: from Swift to Neacademia

Typography has always been central to Salt’s craft. Over the years, our typefaces have marked each chapter in our story. Swift carried us through our earliest years – intelligent, readable, and humane. As Salt moved toward trade publishing around 2005, we turned to Bembo, Sabon, and later Paperback a new font designed by John Downer for House Industries. These faces added warmth and range, reflecting our new, expressive covers and our broader readership.

In 2009 we left Quark XPress for Adobe InDesign, a shift that profoundly changed how we worked. For the first time, text, image, and layout could be handled seamlessly within a single environment, making it possible to sustain our typographic standards across an expanding list.

Between 2010 and 2016, the Salt aesthetic deepened: the list diversified, design became more reader-centred, and Hart’s Rules began to define our house style. Attention to punctuation, spacing, and page structure brought quiet coherence to every book.

 

Source: Rosetta Type Foundry.

In 2016, we adopted Neacademia by Sergei Egorov for fiction – a modern classic rooted in Renaissance proportion but sharpened for contemporary use – while continuing to use Sabon for poetry and nonfiction. That same year, we introduced the Salt colophon, listing each book’s typefaces, paper, printer, and place of manufacture. It marked our belief that design should be transparent – that books are crafted objects as much as literary works.

On the discipline of detail

Much of Salt’s typographic beauty lies in what readers may never notice. We’ve long valued the subtle disciplines of good typesetting – proper ligatures, authentic small capitals, and old-style numerals that rest naturally within the text line. In the early years, we even drew on older compositor traditions – inserting thin spaces before colons and semicolons – though we later abandoned these refinements to bring our practice fully in line with Hart’s Rules, now the foundation of our House Style.

A balanced page using InDesign and Salt’s in-house template for fiction.

A spread from Poets in View.

An example of our children’s poetry.

Hart’s informs not only punctuation but the architecture of the book itself – from half-titles and series pages to dedications, epigraphs, and copyright notices. Each page has a rightful place. That underlying order gives Salt books their distinctive calm – the quiet impression that everything is as it should be.

The Salt logotype and digital typography

Our typographic history extends beyond the printed page to the Salt logotype itself. The Salt logo is derived from the letter S of a piece of moveable type. The original wordmark was based on Paperback, aligning our logo with the text designs of the mid-2000s.

This original marque was updated using Raleway – the font our website utilises, designed by Matt McInerney in 2010 and expanded by Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida in 2012. Raleway’s geometric poise and open rhythm lend Salt a modern digital coherence – a typeface that works equally well on screen and in print. It now anchors our website, social-media graphics, and publicity materials, uniting our digital and physical identities.

More recently we have refreshed the Salt marque using Neue Frutiger World, a contemporary reworking of Adrian Frutiger’s seminal humanist sans serif, developed collaboratively by Akaki Razmadze, Edik Ghabuzyan, Adrian Frutiger, Akira Kobayashi, Anuthin Wongsunkakon and others, and released by Monotype. This new cut retains Frutiger’s hallmark clarity and warmth while extending its global typographic range and technical precision. Its refined proportions, exceptional legibility and quiet authority bring a sense of confidence and continuity to the Salt identity, balancing modernity with typographic heritage. The marque now carries a calmer, more assured presence across our website, social-media graphics and publicity materials, harmonising our digital and physical expression with a typeface rooted in both tradition and contemporary design intelligence.

Together, Frutiger, Paperback, and Raleway trace Salt’s movement from print tradition to contemporary presence – from a quiet serif voice to a confident sans-serif conversation.

The art of the cover: design as discovery

Salt’s transition from academic uniformity to trade individuality was driven by a new understanding of the book cover as a vital point of connection. In a bookshop, a cover must do three things – entice, inform, and move. It must speak before a single word is read.

Our early series designs lent us scholarly consistency, but as we entered the trade market we realised that coherence alone wasn’t enough. We needed covers that carried emotion and story. Investing in cover design changed everything: colour, typography, and imagery began working together to build an emotional bridge to the reader.

Some cover designs by The Cover Factory aka … me.

These designs quickly became part of Salt’s public identity. Each book looked distinct, yet unmistakably ours. Booksellers began to recognise a Salt title instantly – intelligent, original, beautifully made. The Press’s reputation shifted with its covers: design was no longer decoration but discovery, the first act of reading. Perhaps almost a decade ago, I began giving annual guest lectures about cover design and trade publishing at the UEA, and I will be restarting these at MMU in Manchester in 2026. I think I'm a better designer in my sixties than I ever was in my thirties – but you will be the judge of that.

Branding and visual identity: the shape of a publisher

As our design language matured, so did our identity. What began as a series of formal templates became a recognisable brand – a quiet signature across every medium.

The typographic clarity of the Salt logotype, the consistent use of Raleway in our digital materials, publicity and catalogues (your reading this right now – with Roboto Slab for headings), and the elegance of our book design together created a unified voice. In bookshops, that coherence projects confidence: readers and booksellers alike recognise a Salt title as a mark of quality.

For us, branding has never been a corporate exercise. It’s an extension of our editorial and typographic philosophy – communication as care. Actually, reading this, I’d go further and say communication as community, because everything we do serves booksellers and readers. Every choice, from a dash to a dust jacket, is an act of hospitality, welcoming readers to the world of the book. We began reading more fervently about the deep history of publishing and its collision with the world of design, craft and artefact.

Reflections on design as craft and ethos

Reading back through this page, I realise that the history of design at Salt is my own history. I hope you’ll forgive this conflation. It’s often the case in businesses large and small that individuals can have considerable impact on brand management and product design. I think my own life in book design has been informed by tradition, but led by innovation. All underpinned by considerable transformations in print design over the past thirty years. While the modes and methods of production have changed, the book is an incredibly resilient object in our lives. And it’s an object that should be informed by understanding the origins of publishing.

I hope I’ve left you with a clear message, that typography and design aren’t ancillary arts but central disciplines at Salt. They express the values that guide every decision we make – attention, proportion, and integrity. The faces and tools may change, but the commitment endures – to make books that are both readable and beautiful, built to last in the hand and in the mind. As our current tagline says: Beautiful books you won’t forget. 

Explore our latest books here: New books 2025 and New Books 2026.