“Since typography appertains to each and all, it leaves no room for revolutionary changes. We cannot alter the essential shape of a single letter without at the same time destroying the familiar printed face of our language, and thereby rendering it useless.”
— Jan Tschichold, Essays on the Morality of Good Design
Jan Tschichold was an important 20th-century German graphic designer, typographer, book designer, teacher and writer who also gave a major impetus to the Swiss school. Jan Tschichold attended the “Akademie for Grafische Künste and Buchgewerbe” in Leipzig from 1919 until 1921. In 1923 Jan Tschichold visited the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar. Influenced by the new Bauhaus typography, Jan Tschichold began to use serifless typefaces and designed simplified layouts.
Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy. This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in architecture or the fine arts. Tschichold’s artisan background may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks. After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism.
After Tschichold took up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, both he and Tschichold were denounced as “cultural Bolshevists.” Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold’s books were seized by the Gestapo “for the protection of the German people.” After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933. Apart from short visits to England in 1937–1938 (at the invitation of the Penrose Annual), and 1947–1949 (at the invitation of Ruari McLean, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of Penguin Books), he lived the rest of his life in Switzerland. Jan Tschichold died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974.