Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold (German pronunciation: [jan ˈtʃɪçɔlt]; born Johannes Tzschichhold; (2 April 1902 – 11 August 1974), also known as Iwan Tschichold or Ivan Tschichold, was a German calligrapher, typographer and book designer. 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 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.

Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy. In 1919, he began in the class of Hermann Delitzsch a study on the Leipziger Akademie der Künste (Leipzig Academy of the Arts). Due to his extraordinary achievements, he soon became a master pupil of the rector of Walter Tiemann, a type designer with the 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. 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. 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.

Tschichold had converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement mentioned above); 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 typefaces but sans-serif (called Grotesk in Germany). He also favoured non-centered design (e.g., on title pages), and codified many other Modernist design rules. The idea of the New was the basis for the transformation of the entire system of printed graphics and graphic design. 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.