Jan Tschichold

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Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold in 1963
Born
Johannes Tzschichhold

(1902-04-02)2 April 1902
Leipzig, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Died11 August 1974(1974-08-11) (aged 72)
Locarno, Switzerland
Occupation(s)Calligrapher, typographer, book designer

Jan Tschichold (German pronunciation:

book designer.[1][2] He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures. His direction of the visual identity of Penguin Books[3] in the decade following World War II served as a model for the burgeoning design practice of planning corporate identity programs. He also designed the typeface Sabon.[4]

Life

Title page for Typographische Gestaltung, written and designed by Jan Tschichold using City Medium and Bodoni. Published in 1932 by the Benno Schwabe & Co. publishing house.

Tschichold was the son of a provincial

Gebr.-Klingspor foundry, and was given the task of teaching his fellow students. At the same time, he received the first orders as part of the Leipzig Trade Fair
and in 1923 set up his own business as a typographic consultant to a print shop.

This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in architecture or the fine arts. It also may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom typefaces as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock faces on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks.

Although, up to this moment, he had only worked with historical and traditional typography, he radically changed his approach after his first visit to the Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar.[5] After being introduced to important artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and others who were carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography. He became sympathetic to this attempt to find new ways of expression and to reach a much more experimental way of working, but at the same time, felt it was important to find a simple and practical approach.

He became one of the most important representatives of the "new typography" and in a special issue of Typographischen Mitteilungen (typographic communications) in 1925 with the title of "Elementare Typografie" (elementary typography), he summarized the new approaches in the form of theses.

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 communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, they were both 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 Gestapo "for the protection of the German people".[citation needed] After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland
, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933.

Apart from two longer stays in England in 1937 (at the invitation of the

Penrose Annual), and 1947–1949 (at the invitation of Ruari McLean, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of Penguin Books), Tschichold lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life. He died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974.[6]

Design

The Van de Graaf canon, used in book design to divide a page in pleasing proportions, was popularized by Jan Tschichold in his book The Form of the Book.
Depiction of the proportions in a medieval manuscript. According to Jan Tschichold: "Page proportion 2:3. Margin proportions 1:1:2:3. Text area proportioned in the Golden Section."[7]

Tschichold had converted to

Modernist typography, which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany.[10]
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

fascistic
.

Between 1947 and 1949 Tschichold lived in England, where he oversaw the redesign of 500 paperbacks published by Penguin Books, leaving them with a standardized set of typographic rules, the Penguin Composition Rules.[12] 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 inexpensive mass-market paperbacks, he was following a line of work — in cheap popular culture forms (e.g. film posters) — that he had always pursued during his career.[citation needed] He was succeeded at Penguin by Hans Schmoller.

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 Style. Unimpressed by the use of realist or neo-grotesque typefaces, which he saw as a revival of poorly designed models, his survey of typefaces in advertising deliberately made no mention of such designs, save for a reference to 'survivals from the nineteenth-century which have recently enjoyed a short-lived popularity.'[13]

Typefaces

Sabon typeface designed by Tschichold, and released in 1967. One of its earliest uses was by Bradbury Thompson in setting the Washburn College Bible.

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 macron below them, though the umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.

Typefaces Tschichold designed include:

Sabon was designed to be a typeface that would give the same reproduction on both

Monotype and Linotype systems and there were also matrices made for type foundries. All type produced could be interchanged. It was used early after its release by Bradbury Thompson to set the Washburn College
Bible. A “Sabon Next” was later released by Linotype as an ‘interpretation’ of Tschichold's original Sabon.

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ Vasilieva E. (2022) Jan Tschichold and the concept of the new: a picture of the world and an artistic program // Terra Artis. Arts and Design, 3, 34-49.
  2. ^ Stirton, Paul (2019). Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: graphic design between the World Wars. Bard Graduate Center Gallery. New York City: Yale University Press.
  3. ^ Doubleday, Richard B. Jan Tschichold, Designer: The Penguin Years (2006. Oak Knoll Press & Lund Humphries)
  4. OCLC 785574282
    .
  5. ISBN 9781568980843
    .
  6. ^ Jan Tschichold—Posters of the AvantGarde written by Martijn F. Le Coultre and Alston W. Purvis page 21
  7. ^ Jan Tschichold—Posters of the AvantGarde written by Martijn F. Le Coultre and Alston W. Purvis, p. 43, Fig 4. "Framework of ideal proportions in a medieval manuscript without multiple columns. Determined by Jan Tschichold 1953. Page proportion 2:3. margin proportions 1:1:2:3, Text area proportioned in the Golden Section. The lower outer corner of the text area is fixed by a diagonal as well."
  8. ^ Tschichold J. Die neue Typographie. Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäß Schaffende, Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker, Berlin 1928.
  9. ^ Vasilieva E. (2022) Jan Tschichold and the concept of the new: a picture of the world and an artistic program // Terra Artis. Arts and Design, 3, 34-49.
  10. ^ Stirton, Paul (2019). Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: graphic design between the World Wars. Bard Graduate Center Gallery. New York City: Yale University Press.
  11. ^ "Jan Tschichold : Design Is History". www.designishistory.com. Retrieved 2019-05-30.
  12. ^ Richard Doubleday. "Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books" (PDF).
  13. ^ Hollis, Richard (2006). Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  14. ^ Horn, Frederick A. (1936). "Gutenberg on his Metal: c". Art & Industry. pp. 42–3. Retrieved 12 August 2017.
  15. ISBN 978-1-85669-487-2
    .

Sources

External links

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