Jan Tschichold : Blog 7

Jan Tschichold   

Jan Tschichold is the person who applied new approaches to the daily problems in design. He explained these to wide area of people that has to do with graphic design work such as printers, typesetters and obviously designers.

Tschichold is the son of an artistic man, a sign painter and designer in Germany. Tschichold started training in calligraphy from a very early stage. At the age of twenty-one, he visited the first Bauhaus exhibition and was inspired instantly. In fact in his designs he makes use of characteristics from the Bauhaus and also from Russian Constructivism.

Tschicold goes to Switzerland during the rise of the Nazi. He focused on the new typography. He designed a magazine which explained the rules of asymmetrical typography to printers, typesetters and designers. This booklet’s main colour was red and black including avant-garde work. At this point in Germany, the most used layout was still medieval and symmetrical.

In 1928 Tischichol’s new ideas were all inserted in his book ‘Die neue Typographie’ meaning the new typography. He was fed up with the layouts and used at that time. He wanted to remove the use of clean lines and symmetrical layouts and to introduce new asymmetrical typography in order to create more visually interesting works. In his book, he set four main rules for the standardization of modern type. He rejected all use of serif type. Only Sans Serif types were allowed to be used. He also set standard sizes for paper and guidelines for those who form a typographic hierarchy when using the type in certain designs.

Tschichold aimed for functionality and also for the most direct way and clear explanation. He highlighted the importance of machine composition and its effect on graphic design. He favoured the beauty of modern design without any use of decoration. He also liked headlines that are aligned with the left of the margin, with different line lengths and also different weights for sans serif type. He says that this type of design expresses the new age of machine that they were in. These characteristics give value, texture and balance to the work. The white space was given new importance to the structure of the basic shapes used in typography. The significance of such rules was clarity and functionalism and not just beauty.

Tschichold’s text is still relevant for today’s design. Finally, he ended up working as a classicist theory, where designs were centered and roman typefaces were used as they were ideal for blocks of copy. Tschichold also spent part of his life working for Penguin Books where he established standardization for the covers of all their books. After a long time, we must say that he left a lifelong impression on designers’ work, thoughts and their use of typography. This will definitely continue to affect more designers in the future.

Bibliography

Anon., 2009. Design is History. [Online] 

Available at: http://www.designishistory.com/1920/jan-tschichold/

[Accessed 16 11 2014].

Purvis, P. B. M. a. A. W., 2012. Jan Tschichold and the New Typography. In: Meggs' History of Graphic Design. New Jersey: John Wiley and sons.