JAN TSCHICHOLD

Jan was born February 4Th 1902 in Germany. Jan was a man that was highly influenced by modern painters, and the Bauhaus. He was a man of many talents with an artisan background, and the skill of calligraphy. Being trained in this field set him aside from other typographers. Most typographers at this time would major in architecture or fine arts. This also explains why he never worked with home made papers and custom fonts; which was something that was very ordinary for typographers at this time.

There was an interesting story with Jan when he had to take up a teaching post. The Nazis had surged after ten days. Later on Jan and his wife got arrested. During the arrest soviet posters were found in their flat and they were kept under close watch. All the copies were seized by Gestapo.After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland.
Switzerland is a landlocked Swiss Alps country of roughly 7.7 million people in Western Europe with an area of 41,285 km?. Switzerland is a federal republic consisting of 26 states called Cantons of Switzerland...., and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933.

In 1923 Tschichold was converted to the modernist design principles. He started off with a magazine supplement, then a personal exhibition, then wrote a book that was a manifesto of modern design called Die neue Typography. One of the things that Jan was was non centered designs. He advocated the use of standardized paper sizes for all printed matter. After the book came a series of manuals of the principles of modernist typography.

Between 1926-1929 he designed a universal alphabet. He created this to clean up the multi graphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language.

He also designed a variety of typefaces which include:

Transit (1931)

Saskia (1931/1932)

Zeus (1931)

Sabon (1966/1967).