About T J Bowes

Typographer, web developer, editor. Practising all three, in various combinations, for the best part of twenty-five years.

Typesetting came first. The name T J Bowes appears in the prelims of a number of books from the early 2000s — the quiet credit in the copyright line that most readers skip over, and that practitioners notice immediately. The discipline of setting type well — proportions, spacing, hierarchy, the relationship between a text block and its margins — remains a genuine preoccupation. It turns out to be a useful way of thinking about almost everything else.

Since 2010, I have managed the web presence for an NHS foundation trust — largely alone, which has meant acquiring skills across a wide range of things: accessibility legislation, web development, patient-facing content, digital communications strategy. Writing and editing are part of that work too. The breadth is not accidental. It is how the job actually works, and it is an asset rather than a distraction.

My academic background was in International Development, with a postgraduate qualification in Publishing Studies. The intellectual formation is in how knowledge is produced, distributed, and made accessible — which is, at root, what the manifesto on the home page is about.

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Areas of practice include typesetting and book design, print-on-demand publishing, web development (accessible, semantic HTML and CSS), digital accessibility and WCAG compliance, plain-language writing and editing, and patient-facing health content.

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Occasionally I take on a project. When that happens, it is generally without charge — partly from a deep-seated aversion to completing tax returns, and partly from a conviction that not everything needs to be a monetary transaction. The web was not built that way. Neither were books, really.