Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold ( born as John Tzschichhold, even Ivan Tschichold, ivan tschichold ) ( born April 2, 1902 in Leipzig, † August 11, 1974 in Locarno, Switzerland ) was a calligrapher, typographer, type designer, poster designer, author and teacher.

He was one of the spokesmen of the New Typography. His most famous design is the font Sabon, a Antiqua.

Biography

John Tzschichhold was born in 1902 the son of a painter's signature in Leipzig and dealt with early on calligraphy. In 1919 he began writing in the class of Hermann Delitsch to study at the Leipzig Academy of Arts. Due to its remarkable achievements, he soon became a master student of the rector Walter Tiemann - a type designer at Gebr - Klingspor foundry - and has been commissioned to teach his fellow students. At the same time he received the first orders in the context of the Leipzig Fair and started in 1923 as typographic consultant to a print shop independently.

So far only dealt with historical and traditional typography, took his work after his first visit to the Bauhaus an entirely new direction: Tzschichhold learned important artists like Laszlo Moholy -Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, among others know whose ambition it was to leave in the context of the New Typography of the Bauhaus, the conventional schemes typography to find new ways of expression and to reach a much more experimental work. At the same time they wanted to standardize, simplify and do more practical. Tzschichhold followed thrilled with the new principles, called itself (Simplified written ) even out of sympathy for upcoming predominantly from the east flows Ivan and Tschichold.

Due to his enthusiasm and expertise, he became one of the most important representatives of the New Typography. Unlike others, he did not fall completely out of the historical and technically justified frame, but made ​​the avant-garde ideas generally usable. In a much -vaunted special issue of the typographic messages from 1925, entitled Elementary Typography he introduced the new approaches together in the form of theses.

It was followed by a phase of application: In 1926, he was by Paul Renner - appointed to the Munich Master School of typography - the creator of the Futura. Here he called himself at the insistence of the authorities Jan Tschichold. It was, inter alia, a series of posters for the Munich Phoebus Palace. Many film posters for this largest German movie palace dominated the public space of the city: Clear, cropped, sometimes bold font. Beams emphasize the surface, but not rend, and again diagonal.

In 1929 he designed a typeface that would implement the speech sounds better than the traditional alphabet, with some very peculiar characters. In 1931 he designed the Zeus, Transito writings, and Saskia and Uhertype standard sans serif for an early phototypesetting system.

1933 found the New Typography, due to the seizure of power by the Nazis came to an abrupt end, even Tschichold emigrated to Switzerland from. Here he began a new, radically different and at the same time conservative period of his career, in which he rejected the principles of the New Typography vehemently. Although these shining through in all places of his later work yet, but he struck a far traditionalistischeren a way, picked as the use of older roman typefaces, ornaments, symmetrical grouping etc. back on. In this context Tschichold in 1946 provided a discharged into the typographic messages confrontation with Max Bill, a proponent of the New Typography.

1943 published Tschichold competition " The Most Beautiful Swiss Books " awarded in the journal Swiss book trade, the first held in the following year and is still worn by the Swiss Association of Publishers and the Federal Office of Culture.

Tschichold worked for the Basel Birkhäuser Verlag as a book producer and went for two years in 1947 to England, where he worked for Penrose Annual and worked on the redesign of Penguin Books, and a concept for their typographic designers; he drew it responsible for the typography of appearing since 1939 series King Penguin Books, which was modeled on the German island - library. Back in Switzerland, he worked tirelessly until his death in 1974.

In 1964, his works at the documenta III in Kassel in the Department graphics were shown. 1966 created the Sabon - named after Garamond student Jacob Sabon, who brought the Garamond to Frankfurt - a Renaissance roman style Garamond, which is characterized by its round, clear typeface with a Garamond for a relatively high x-height. The special feature of this font character is that he is in all three then existing record systems (hand set, line-casting (Linotype ) and letter font (Monotype ) machines set) totally looked the same, the typeface is impaired so not by their technical characteristics.

1965 Tschichold was honored for his contributions to the font with the Gutenberg Prize of the city of Leipzig.

Writings

• Saskia ( Schelter & Giesecke, Leipzig 1931)
• Zeus (1931 )
• Uhertype standard Grotesque (1931 )
• Sabon (1967 )