jasmine li written assignment
Jan Tschichold is a graphic designer born in Leipzig, Germany in designer 1902. He was the son of a signwriter and therefore started out having a background in calligraphy at a young age, with the 1914’s World Fair for Books & Graphics cementing his interest in the field. At this time, he was still more interested in serif fonts and black letters such as the Maximilian Grotesk which were still popu- lar in Germany. It was only in 1923, where the Bauhaus Exhibi- tion introduced him to the Modernist movement and he fell “in a great state of agitation” having had experienced this new found style he has never seen before. He became adamant in embrac- ing the use of sans serif typefaces, standardized paper sizes, asym- metrical geometric shapes, white space utilization, and hierarchal content, calling it the “total complex of contemporary life”. He then went on to give speeches and publish books such as the “Die neue Typographie” (The New Typography; A Handbook for Modern Designers) in 1928 advocating the Modernist movement across Europe. In 1933, the Nazis declared Tschichold a “cultural Bolshevist” and sent him to prison, but soon fled and took - ref uge to Switzerland. After this experience in his life, his viewpoint changed yet again, believing that some of the modern typefaces were too closely related to the fascist movement, causing his Mod- ernist influence to fade in his later works, releasing works such as the serif typeface Sabon. He died in 1974 at Locarno, Switzerland.
From 1947 to 1949, Tschichold was the book cover designer for Left: Penguin Book Penguin books and created a standardized set of typographic rules covers before to use in each book. He changed the typeface for “Penguin Books” Right: Penguin Book from a black letter font into a san serif font, similar to the Gill Sans font covers by Jan Tschichold and used the same font for continuity throughout the book cover. The space between words is shortened and the font size is smaller. The penguin character and the border around the publisher’s name is also given less weight by using less black and cleaner lines. The changes are minimal, but it significantly changes how pleasing the book cover looks. The horizontal line added between the book title and the author name brings it all together by giving the words and the space around them a sense of symmetry and hierarchal order.
Tschichold designed several advertisements to promote his book Poster for “Die Neue “Die neue Typographie” with this being one of them. Here he was Typographie” able to present a lot of text without making the poster look con- densed with too much information. Using rigid columns and appro- priate use of white space, he was able to separate the information into categorized pieces, making the overall presentation aestheti- cally pleasing. The text is also all justified to keep everything looking clean and geometric as if they are bounded by boxes. Keeping in line with the Modernist approach he was promoting, he exclusively used sans serif font and brought attention to certain words by bolding them. The yellow background and accented bold lines brings the poster to life by drawing attention to its seemingly flamboyant na- ture. Titles are written all in uppercase and are bolded to give a sense of urgency and command, with the upper-right corner text given a bolded dash underneath to make it seem like a header, or a begin- ning introduction background to the story. The vertical dash used at the last paragraph of the body text is used like a glpyh, signaling the end to the article of text, giving it a dramatic stop as a finish-signal.