Jan Tschichold
German typographer who made use of both modern and classical fonts. He was born in Leipzig, Germany, on April 2, 1902 and died in Locarno, Switzerland, on August 11, 1974.
Early in his career Jan Tschichold was a shit-disturber of the highest order, writing at length about all that had gone wrong since the industrialization of printing, and in particular of the complacency and mediocrity dogging typography between the wars. He wrote about revolutionary concepts like asymmetrical page layout and reinvention of the alphabet; and for this bolshevism he was incarcerated by the Nazis.
Riding out the war in England, Tschichold worked with Penguin Books to establish design standards, composing manuals and sets of instruction which are as valuable today as fifty years ago. Later on he was no less of a firebrand, but wrote instead about learning from the past, and he became a great scholar and collector of printed and scribal manuscripts.
(quick biography taken from http://www.textism.com/textfaces/index.html?id=19)
Among his major achievements is the redesigning of Penguin Books in 1945.
Among the fonts he has designed are
- Transit (1931)
- Saskia (1931)
- Zeus (1931)
- Sabon (1967) -
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
Related articles
