JAN TSCHICHOLD: Jan Tschichold made two unique contributions to the history and practice of

A LIFE IN TYPOGRAPHY typography.

The first was that, as a young design student, he saw and was inspired by the
modern movement proclaimed by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus in Weimar
in 1923. Tschichold showed - as no-one in the Bauhaus had done - how the
new ideas could be used to improve the design of ordinary, day-to-day
printing. This could only be achieved, he said at the time, by asymmetrical
design and sanserif type. But he never forgot that the real purpose of
typography is communication.

The second was when, having been hounded out of Germany by the Nazis as
a preacher of what they called ‘Kultur-Bolschewismus’, and working first in
Switzerland and then in Britain, Tschichold saw that asymmetry was not the
only way to design printed matter. The fundamentals of typographic design
were much wider. Typography in all its aspects is not only a matter of certain
basic laws, but it also and always always depends on the narrowest details.

By his practice and teaching, Tschichold’s contribution to the typography of
the twentieth century was to show the importance of getting all the details
right - with elegance.

Tschichold was born in Leipzig on 2 April 1902, the eldest son of a sign
painter and lettering artist. Lettering was therefore something he knew about
from his earliest days. He wanted to become an artist, but his parents thought
this was too uncertain a career, so he set out to become a teacher of drawing.
However, lettering and printing fascinated him. He studied Edward Johnston’s
Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering in the translation of Anna Simons,
and works by German lettering artists including Rudolf von Larisch.
Gradually he found himself more and more attracted to type design. At the
age of seventeen he was enrolled at the Academy for Graphic Arts and Book
Production in Leipzig. In 1921, at the age of nineteen, he was appointed by
Walter Tiemann (1876-1951), Director of the Leipzig Academy, to be
assistant in charge of the evening classes in lettering at the Academy.

Examples of Tschichold’s lettering from this period show him to have become
already both highly skilful and inventive.

In August 1923 he went to see the first Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar. For the
first time he saw the work of the ‘moderns’: Herbert Bayer, Josef Albers,

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