Living on the margins has never been synonymous with comfort. Nor is it when we talk about printed pages. If you print something at home and the document’s margins are too narrow, the printer resizes the content without asking. If you design a book and miscalculate the central area that disappears into the spine, you’ll end up wrenching it open just to finish a sentence. In short: that in albis space —seemingly neutral— is anything but a safe zone.
A margin must justify its existence, but what I didn’t know until now is that the absence of a margin demands even more justification. Why? Because I’m finishing a visual identity project where, quite literally, we’ve eaten up the margins. Not because the client is a restaurant and we wanted to make the obvious joke, but because the restaurant is called Almarge — a made-up Catalan word meaning “on the margin,” all fused into one. So, for the sake of conceptual coherence, we decided the text should behave the same way: right up to the edge, deliberately ignoring the white space meant to protect the content.
I explained this more or less to my friend Jordi Moreno the other day, but in the end, I had to show him. I hope you’re still following, because I honestly don’t know how else to explain it.
Living on the margins has never been synonymous with comfort. Nor is it when we talk about printed pages. That in albis space —seemingly neutral— is anything but a safe zone.
What I didn’t anticipate was how complicated this little design joke would become once it hit production. In my head, it made perfect sense: if the restaurant is called Almarge, what could be more fitting than pushing the design to the literal margin of the page? But the line between graphic irreverence and actual mistake is razor-thin — like the difference between a soft-boiled egg and a hard-boiled one. And here, I think we hit both textures.
Dolors, who was going to print the business cards, politely checked if I understood the consequences: “I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but if we cut along the crop marks, the text sits right at the edge and we risk cutting off a letter.”
The copy shop that was supposed to print the menus wasn’t so delicate. Despite our explanation, they flagged our incompetence with a line that said: “Could you come by the shop to review the files? They’re not correct — the crop marks go over the text.”
Conclusion: Marta from Almarge took matters into her own hands. She bought a cutter, a cutting mat, and a ruler. And between lunch service and dinner, she’s trimming each menu by hand, one by one.
Some might say we overcomplicated things.
And they’d be right.
Warm regards from H6 bus,
Ingrid
