Jan Tschichold (2 April 1902
LeipzigLeipzig is, with a population of 515,459, the largest city in the federal state of Saxony, Germany.-Origins:Leipzig's name is derived from the Slavic word Lipsk, which means "settlement where the lime trees stand"....
,
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
– 11 August 1974
LocarnoLocarno is the capital of the Locarno district, located on the northern tip of Lake Maggiore in the Swiss canton of Ticino, close to Ascona at the foot of the Alps. It has a population of about 15,000...
,
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
) was a
typographerTypography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques...
, book designer, teacher and writer.
Tschichold was the son of a provincial
signwriterA house painter and decorator is a tradesman responsible for the painting and decorating of buildings, and is also known as a decorator or house painter...
, and he was trained in
calligraphyCalligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of writing . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
. This
artisanAn artisan is a skilled manual worker who crafts items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewelry, household items, and tools...
background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in
architectureFor a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of architecture. Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use....
or the
fine artFine art describes any art form developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than utility. This type of art is often expressed in the production of art objects using visual and performing art forms, including painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, architecture, photography and...
s.
Tschichold's artisan background may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks.
Jan Tschichold (2 April 1902
LeipzigLeipzig is, with a population of 515,459, the largest city in the federal state of Saxony, Germany.-Origins:Leipzig's name is derived from the Slavic word Lipsk, which means "settlement where the lime trees stand"....
,
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
– 11 August 1974
LocarnoLocarno is the capital of the Locarno district, located on the northern tip of Lake Maggiore in the Swiss canton of Ticino, close to Ascona at the foot of the Alps. It has a population of about 15,000...
,
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
) was a
typographerTypography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques...
, book designer, teacher and writer.
Life
Tschichold was the son of a provincial
signwriterA house painter and decorator is a tradesman responsible for the painting and decorating of buildings, and is also known as a decorator or house painter...
, and he was trained in
calligraphyCalligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of writing . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
. This
artisanAn artisan is a skilled manual worker who crafts items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewelry, household items, and tools...
background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in
architectureFor a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of architecture. Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use....
or the
fine artFine art describes any art form developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than utility. This type of art is often expressed in the production of art objects using visual and performing art forms, including painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, architecture, photography and...
s.
Tschichold's artisan background may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks. After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to
communismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
.
After Tschichold took up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, both he and Tschichold were denounced as "cultural Bolshevists". Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold's books were seized by the
GestapoThe was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning in April 1934, it was under the overall administration of the Schutzstaffel under Heinrich Himmler in his position as leader of the SS and Chief of German Police...
"for the protection of the German people". After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933. Apart from short visits to
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1937-1938 (at the invitation of the Penrose Annual), and 1947-1949 (at the invitation of
Ruari McLeanJohn David Ruari McLean CBE, DSC was a leading British typographic designer.-Early life and apprenticeship:Ruari McLean was born in Newton Stewart, Galloway, Scotland and educated at the Dragon School and Eastbourne College. He was apprenticed in the printing trade at the Shakespeare Head Press,...
, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of
Penguin BooksPenguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Allen Lane. Lane's idea was to provide quality writing cheaply, for the same price as a packet of cigarettes. He also wanted them to be sold not only in bookshops but in railway stations, general stores and corner shops. Its most emblematic products...
), he lived the rest of his life in Switzerland.
Design
Tschichold had converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first
WeimarWeimar is a city in Germany mostly known for its cultural heritage. It is located in the Bundesland of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...
Bauhaus' is the common term for the ', a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933....
exhibition. He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement; then a 1927 personal exhibition; then with his most noted work
Die neue Typographie. This book was a manifesto of modern design, in which he condemned all fonts but
sans-serifIn typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the Latin word sans, meaning "without"....
(called 'Grotesk' in Germany). He also favoured non-centered design (e.g., on title pages), and codified many other Modernist design rules. He advocated the use of standardised paper sizes for all printed matter, and made some of the first clear explanations of the effective use of different sizes and weights of type in order to quickly and easily convey information. This book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany. Yet, despite his visits to England just before the war, only about four articles by Tschichold had been translated into English by 1945.
Although
Die neue Typographie remains a classic, Tschichold slowly abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards (e.g. his Saskia typeface of 1932, and his acceptance of classical Roman typefaces for body-type) as he moved back towards
ClassicismClassicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
in print design. He later condemned
Die neue Typographie as too extreme. He also went so far as to condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic.
Between 1947-1949 Tschichold lived in England where he oversaw the redesign of 500
paperbackPaperback, softback, or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or cardboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples.-Use:...
s published by
Penguin BooksPenguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Allen Lane. Lane's idea was to provide quality writing cheaply, for the same price as a packet of cigarettes. He also wanted them to be sold not only in bookshops but in railway stations, general stores and corner shops. Its most emblematic products...
, leaving them with a standardised set of typographic rules, the
Penguin Composition Rules. Although he gave Penguin's books (particularly the Pelican range) a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed the nature of each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages. In working for a firm that made cheap mass-market paperbacks, he was following a line of work - in cheap
popular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture...
forms (e.g. film posters) - that he had always pursued during his career.
His abandonment of Modernist principles meant that, even though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss
International Typographic StyleThe International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style developed in Switzerland in the 1950s that emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk, and...
.
Typefaces
Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a "universal alphabet" to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. For example, he devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs "ch" and "sch". His intentions were to change the spelling by systematically replacing "eu" with "oi", "w" with "v", and "z" with "ts". Long vowels were indicated by a
macronA macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long syllable in Græco-Roman metrics, but now also indicates that the vowel is long...
below them, though the
umlautThe word umlaut is the name of a type of sound shift in spoken language and of the diacritic mark used to represent it orthographically. The diacritic mark comprises a pair of dots or lines placed over the letter that represents the affected vowel sound. When the letter is an i, the diacritic...
was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was
sans-serifIn typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the Latin word sans, meaning "without"....
and without capital letters.
Typefaces Tschichold designed include:
- Transit (1931)
- Saskia (1931/1932)
- Zeus (1931)
- Sabon
Sabon is the name of an old style serif typeface designed by the German born typographer and designer Jan Tschichold in the period 1964–1967...
(1966/1967) - http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_088.jhtml, named after Jacques SabonJacques Sabon , born in Lyon, died in Frankfurt-am-Main, was a famous typefounder. He worked with Christian Egenolff in Frankfurt in 1555 and Christoph Plantin of Amberes in 1565. He is associated with the forms of roman type which were being developed by Claude Garamond and others...
.
Sabon was designed to be a typeface that would give the same reproduction on both Monotype and
LinotypeThe Linotype machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The machine revolutionized printing and especially newspaper publishing, making it possible for a relatively small number of operators to set type for many pages on a daily basis.The Linotype machine operator enters text on a ...
systems. It was used early after its release by
Bradbury ThompsonBradbury Thompson was an influential American graphic designer and art director of the twentieth century.-Life and work:Communication Arts opened an article on Bradbury Thompson, in its March/April 1999 issue, like this: "When it came to the blending of photography, typography and color, nobody...
to set the
Washburn CollegeWashburn University is a co-educational, public, institution of higher learning located in Topeka, Kansas, USA. The university offers a number of undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as professional programs in law and business...
Bible. A "Sabon Next" was later released by Linotype as an 'interpretation' of Tschichold's original Sabon.
See also
- Bauhaus
' is the common term for the ', a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933....
- Canons of page construction
The canons of page construction are a set of principles in the field of book design used to describe the ways that page proportions, margins and type areas of books are constructed....
- List of AIGA medalists
- Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques...
External links