Jan Tschichold was a German typographer and book designer. He was born in Leipzig, Germany, on April 2, 1902 and died in Locarno, Switzerland, on August 11, 1974.
Design
His most noted work is Die neue Typographie, a manifesto of modern design, in which he condemns all fonts but the sans-serif as well as centered design (e.g., on title pages). He advocates the use of standardized paper sizes for all printed matter and makes some of the first clear explanations of the effective use of different sizes and weights of type to quickly and easily convey information. Although the book remains a classic, Tschichold later abandoned his rigid beliefs and condemned the book as too extreme.
In 1945, Tschichold oversaw the redesign of Penguin Books, standardizing their typographic practices with his Penguin Compositing Manual, personally designing many of the titles and redrawing the various Penguin and Puffin logos. Although he gave the books a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages.
Types
Fonts Tschichold designed include:
- Transit (1931)
- Saskia (1931)
- Zeus (1931)
- Sabon (1967) - [1]
Between 1326 and 1329, 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.
Bibliography
- Schriften: 1925 - 1974 Band 1/2. Berlin, 1992
- Die neue Typographie, Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäss Schaffende, Berlin, Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker, 1928
- Typografische Entwurfstechnik, Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1932
- Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie, 1948
- Schatzkammer der Schreibkunst, Basel, 2. Aufl. 1949
- Meisterbuch der Schrift. Ein Lehrbuch mit vorbildlichen Schriften aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart für Schriftenmaler, Graphiker, Bildhauer, Graveure, Lithographen, Verlagshersteller, Buchdrucker, Architekten und Kunstschulen, Ravensburg, 1952, 2. Aufl. 1965
- Geschichte der Schrift in Bildern, Hamburg, 4. Aufl. 1961
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Last updated: 08-21-2005 04:47:31
