Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold (born April 2, 1902, Leipzig, Germany—died August 11, 1974, Locarno, Switzerland) was a German typographer and author who played a seminal role in the development of 20th-century graphic design and typography.

The son of a sign painter, Tschichold trained as a calligrapher and designer at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Production (1919–21) and then freelanced as a lettering artist and designer. The 1923 exhibition of the Bauhaus at Weimar introduced him to Modernist design, and he quickly joined the movement, rejecting traditional fonts and symmetrical composition and instead embracing sans-serif typefaces, geometric construction, and asymmetrical composition. His work, intended to represent the rationalism of the modern age, was functional, aesthetically satisfying, and designed for reproduction by machine-type composition and newer printing technology. Tschichold moved to the forefront of modern design with “elementare typographie,” a special issue of the trade journal Typographische Mitteilungen in 1925, and with his book, Die neue Typographie (1928; The New Typography; A Handbook for Modern Designers), which expounded the principles and functional uses of Modernist typography to printers, type compositors, and designers. In Germany, where black letter, or Gothic script (called Fraktur in German), remained in use until the 20th century, a simplified typeface was both welcome and necessary. Tschichold’s writings and work helped spread Modernist graphic design throughout the world.

After Tschichold was arrested in 1933 by the Nazis for being a “cultural Bolshevik,” he fled to Switzerland and worked as a book designer. For that reason, his Typographische Gestaltung (1935; Asymmetric Typography) and other works were first published in Basel. Finding that some of the absolute rules of modern typography were too close in spirit to the fascist movement, he at this time began to work with more traditional typefaces and layout arrangements. Tschichold designed books for numerous Swiss and German book publishers, became design consultant to the Hoffman-La Roche pharmaceutical company, and designed the widely used Sabon typeface. From 1947 to 1949 Tschichold was typographic designer for Penguin Books in London, where he designed more than 500 title pages and specified the future typography for the Penguin series of paperbacks.

Among the later books of the highly influential typographer are Meisterbuch der Schrift (1966; Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering) and the posthumously published Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie (1975; The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design).