JAN TSCHICHOLD 1902–1974
author: Alan Hejli (Allan Haley)

To look at him, you might think that he was a kindly professor of Latin, or perhaps classical literature. Jan Tschichold appears to be a scholarly, gentle man. Certainly not someone given to harsh words or radical thought.
True to his image, Jan Tschichold was a scholar and an educator. He wrote over 50 books and spent much of his free time teaching. His educational contribu­tion was not, however, in Latin or Greek. Tschichold’s expertise was in typography and typographic communication. How­ever, antithetical to his image, much of his work was quite radical. And to muddy the picture even further, Tschich­old was guilty of contradicting himself on some very basic issues.

TSCHICHOLD THE REVOLUTIONARY

In the early part of this century, Jan Tschichold revolutionized typography by virtually single-handedly making asym­metric typographic arrangement the style of choice among young designers. In doing so he also vehemently attacked symmetry as being an archaic and ineffec­tual typographic style. Twenty-five years later, Tschichold began the Herculean task of redesigning, and restyling, the complete library of Penguin Books. By the time he was done, more than 500 titles had been reworked—almost every one of them arranged typographically symmet­rical!
When he was young, Tschichold drew typefaces that were bold statements of typographic reform; he constructed sans serifs and calligraphic faces that broke traditional rules. Late in life, he cre­ated Sabon, a classic example of tradi­tional typeface design.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

From boyhood, Tschichold was exposed to type, typography, and letterform de­sign. His father, a designer and sign painter, enjoyed his son’s company and encouraged him to spend time at his small shop. When he was 12, as a treat, Tschichold’s father took him to a big printing and graphic arts trade exposition. It was here that the future typographic radical first saw the work of Europe’s best calligraphers and lettering artists. Tschichold was hooked! He knew then that type and letters would always be important to him. First he tried calligraphy. Practicing whenever he had a chance, Tschichold tried to develop his own writing style. As his skills developed, so did his interest in the works of past and present calligraphic masters. The young designer began to study the lettering manuals of Edward Johnston as well as the equally famous, in Germany, Rudolf von Larisch.
By the time he was accepted into the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Art and Book Crafts, Tschichold had developed into a capable and prolific calligrapher. He was a serious pupil: he worked hard, practiced his lettering, studied the accepted rules of calligraphy, and learned traditional typographic theory. As a result of his efforts, Tschichold eventually became a graduate student at the academy under the highly regarded German type designer Walter Tiemann; and he was entrusted with the responsibility of teaching a class in lettering and calligraphy.
Up until his 22d year, Tschichold’s calligraphic and typographic style developed along conservative, if not entirely traditional, lines. He was a “good young designer,” just avant-garde enough to be perceived as one of the new generation, but nowhere near radical enough to cause his mentors any concern.

A NEW SCHOOL OF THOUGHT

Then everything changed. In 1923 Tschichold saw the first major exhibition of the Bauhaus at Weimar — and virtually became an instantaneous convert to the Bauhaus teaching. Like many young converts, Tschichold not only embraced his new religion with zeal, he also felt compelled to renounce vehemently all his earlier ideals. Tschichold completely changed his typographic style, adopting uncompromisingly the new attitudes preached by the Bauhaus. He began to write passionate tracts and articles con­demning traditional typographic style. He even temporarily Russianized his name to Ivan in an attempt to further identify himself with the left-wing stance of the Weimar school. The difference between Tschichold and many other young impassioned converts was that people paid attention to him. Tschichold’s pleas made a difference. One of his articles, “Elementare Typographic,” marks the changing of the face of modern typographic style. In it, and in Die Neue Typographie, a small book he published later, Tschichold advocated scrapping all the then popular German types and replacing them with a single sans serif style; and in addition the abandonment of the fashionable style of symmetrical typographic arrangement for asymmetry. His writing and teaching at this period cast Tschichold in the role of a radical. (The contradictions were to come later.)
In the late 1920s, Tschichold emerged as one of the most ardent and uncompromising advocates of modern typography. No dilettante, he was also one of its most skillful exponents. In numerous articles and in hundreds of actual examples, he codified and demonstrated the principles of asymmetrical typographic arrangement. He also designed a “mono-case” (incorporating either capital or lowercase letterforms) sans serif typeface, and published fervent arguments in favor of the use of sans serif type.

REVOLUTION AGAINST WHAT?

To be fair, Tschichold had a lot of bad typography to react to. The “freie richtung” (free typography) movement of the late 1890s and the Jugenstijl (art nouveau) movement of the early 1900s cluttered German graphic communication with decorative typefaces which at times were almost unreadable, and with a set of typographic rules which hindered, rather than supported, effective communication. Tschichold was reacting to a typographic style that was overly decorative, self-aware, and fussy—at best, mediocre. He believed that one well-designed, straightforward typeface was an infinitely better communicator than all the “fancy types” together; and that facile typographic tricks and affectations should be replaced with the simple dynamism of asymmetries. Tschichold’s work of this period was a reflection of his teaching. His graphic design had an energy and strength that was unprecedented.
Perhaps the most characteristic of Tschichold’s work during this period is his poster for the Exhibition of Constructivism, which he designed in 1937. In this piece his exceptionally subtle use of line, graphic elements, and typographic arrangement creates asymmetric dynamism at its best.
For over 15 years, Tschichold created posters, book covers, advertisements, and even letterheads that were quintessential examples of asymmetric design. His work not only created a new typographic genre, it also served as the benchmark of those who followed in his footsteps.
But then something happened. After changing the typographic world and converting countless designers to his way of thinking, Jan Tschichold changed his own mind!
Actually, what Tschichold experienced was more akin to a slow conversion than it was to a spur-of-the-moment change of heart. The results, however, were no less drastic.

WHY THE CHANGE?

Tschichold’s transformation began when he took on commissions to design mass-market books—textbooks, novels, historical fiction, biographies, etc.—instead of posters and his own manuals on typography and graphic design. These were items produced for, and published by, conservative-minded people. Over time, this line of work became Tschichold’s main source of income. The more books he designed, the more he realized that one typographic style could not answer all the needs of all typographic applications; and that to insist that the opposite was true
was roughly the equivalent of typographic dictatorship.
Tschichold realized that good typography has to be perfectly legible and, as such, the choices of classical types like Garamond, Jenson, and Baskerville are not only the traditional choice, but also the logical choice for most books. Typographic statements from Tschichold also became much more conservative: “Sans serif is good for certain cases of emphasis, but is now used to the point of abuse. The occasions for using sans serif are as rare as those for using obtrusive decorations.” As for asymmetry, Tschichold still considered it to be the most vibrant and stimulating typographic arrangement, but he learned that few of his peers had the talent or discipline to use it correctly. Asymmetric typographic arrangement still held a special attraction for Tschichold, but he became less and less evangelical about converting the world to this design style.
Sadly, Tschichold became the object of typographic ridicule simply for changing his mind. His followers saw in his books, articles, and teaching a way of providing solutions to all typographic problems. Many of them blindly set him up as their “typographic god”—and gods fall very hard from grace.

FOLLOWERS SPEAK OUT

One disciple, the Swiss architect and designer Max Bill, writing in a German trade magazine, made the impassioned accusation that Tschichold was a renegade from his own teaching, and went on to great lengths to show the contradictions between the gospel for 1928 and Tschichold’s later work.
Making his reply some time later in the same periodical, Tschichold sympathizes with the disillusionment felt by his earlier supporters, but asks, in effect, if they would rather he suppress his enlightened beliefs and continue to teach what he no longer felt to be true? He then went on in the article, in a manner typical of the kind teacher, to produce further examples of his contradictions: ones missed by Max Bill. Tschichold’s circumstance proves, once again, that there is a heavy price to pay if you are a revolutionary (especially a successful one) and continue to seek the truth beyond simple answers.

A CHANGE COMPLETED

Tschichold’s new classical style was perfected just after World War II. In August of 1946, the founder of Penguin Books provided him the opportunity to redesign the complete Penguin product offering. This was to be the most extensive and most difficult challenge of Tschichold’s career.
At the time the publishers of Penguin Books commissioned Tschichold, they had been using printers scattered throughout England to produce their books. Penguin was not staffed for making regular visits to these printers, nor were they able to respond quickly to the varied typographic problems they ran into in the regular course of book production. As a result, the printers began to rely more and more on their own house style (or in too many cases, whim) to solve design and typographic problems. The books suffered. At best they were inconsistent in design and quality; more often, they were poor examples of typographic communication.
Immediately upon beginning his employment at Penguin, Tschichold produced a typographic style manual: a small booklet that began to outline the basic guidelines he required. Tschichold recalled that, “It was comparatively easy to persuade the machine compositors to observe these rules,” but that the hand compositors “obviously understood nothing of what I meant...” He clearly had no small task on his hands.
One of the guidelines Tschichold sought was the even spacing of capital letters on title pages. (When setting metal type by hand, this is a somewhat tedious and difficult task of hand insertion or deletion of spacing material—something which the Penguin compositors preferred to save themselves the trouble of doing.) Since Tschichold edited the typography of every book, he first tried to make simple suggestions to improve character spacing, but soon was forced to have a rubber stamp made which printed “Equalize Letter Spacing According to Their Optical Value.” This tack did not work either. Tschichold complained that, “This stamp was practically never noticed.” In frustration, he began the tedious, and time consuming, task of writing by hand individual instructions for every occasion for which he sought letter spacing improvement. Proof pages were sent back to the printers littered with phrases like, “one-half pt. in,” or “2 pts. out!”— and these were only the notes pertaining to character spacing!
Tschichold edited every page of every book that Penguin produced. At first, pages were sent back to printers with more red than black ink! Gradually, however, the printers began to understand Tschichold’s requirements, and book quality improved.
After he was satisfied that his most basic of composition rules for book production “had been settled and duly propagated,” Tschichold went on to reform the design of every Penguin book.

MORE CHOICES

First he made sweeping changes to the typeface repertoire formally supported by Penguin. For the sake of consistency, and probably convenience, all previous Penguin books were set in Times Roman. Tschichold felt that Times was a good newspaper face (indeed, it was originally created as such) but that it was somewhat lacking when it came to book typography. Not “to throw out the baby with the bath,” Tschichold did continue to use Times (about 20 percent of the Penguin books continued to be set in the face), but he also widened the composition spectrum to include faces such as Baskerville, Bembo, Garamond, and Caslon. Even the Penguin trademark did not escape Tschichold’s attention. After a number of his changes to the book format, the old trademark looked out of place. Tschichold’s answer to the problem? Redesign.
Tschichold worked at the Penguin book project for 29 months. At the end, well in excess of 500 books were prepared for printing by his skilled hand—most on a page-by-page basis. Tschichold, himself, stated that his work must have set some kind of typographic world record! During the whole process he never wavered from his standards and never provided anything less than 100 percent commitment to the project. And, as a result, he was completely satisfied with the results. Of the project he wrote, “A publishing firm, that manufactures books in millions to millions, has in any case been able to prove that the cheapest of books can be just as beautifully set and produced as more expensive ones, indeed, even better than most of them!”

TSCHICHOLD THE TYPE DESIGNER

In addition to being a teacher, typographer, book designer, and rebel, Tschichold was also a typeface designer. While his monocase sans was not cast as type, and only remains in reproduction of his drawings, two typefaces were designed (and released) in his younger, less conservative years. Transito is a sans serif in the tradition of Futura Black and was created for the Amsterdam type foundry early in the 1930s. It is strictly a display face and saw little use when first issued—and less continued popularity. Shortly after the release of Transito, Tschichold drew Saskia for the Schelter & Giesecke foundry of Leipzig. This too, was a sans serif design, but with much greater calligraphic overtones than his previous design. In fact, the final renderings for the punch cutters were based on letterforms Tschichold drew with a broad-edged pen. The completed design was released in 6- to 60-point type, was more stylish than practical, and enjoyed little popularity outside a small group of Tschichold’s followers. Tschichold also produced a number of phototype faces for Uhertype of Berlin, but none survived World War II.
Sabon, a typographic tour de force, is the face that establishes Tschichold’s reputation as a type designer.
In the early 1960s, a group of German printers approached Tschichold with a decidedly unique and exceptionally difficult design problem. They sought a type that could be set on either Monotype or Linotype composition equipment, or as handset foundry type, with no perceptible difference in the final product. This meant that all the drawbacks of both Monotype and Linotype composing machines, such things as varying point bodies, kerning restrictions, different unit systems, and duplexing character sets, had to be contended with.
The completed design, released in 1966, not only solved the imposed design problem, it is also an exceptionally beautiful (and useful) design in its own right. So successful was it that, unlike his earlier faces, it continues to be used today, in metal and in photo and digital form.
Sabon has been called “modern Garamond,” which is somewhat misleading. Actually, it’s not a Garamond, but its own design that was patterned loosely on specimen sheets of the early Frankfurt printer and type founder Konrad Berner. The story is told that Berner married the widow of Jacques Sabon (hence the typeface name) who, it is also said, brought some of Garamond’s original matrices to Frankfurt (hence the design similarity to Garamond).

THE TEACHER'S SIMPLE RULE

When Jan Tschichold died in 1974, the typographic community lost one of its kindest teachers and most gifted practitioners. Tschichold was an artist and craftsperson of the highest order, one who practiced what he preached. He ultimately demanded only one obligation of his followers and students: to organize typographic communication so that it is easy to read and pleasant to view. “Grace in typography,” he wrote, “comes of itself when the compositor brings a certain love to his work. Whoever does not love his work cannot hope that it will please others.”