Saturday, April 21, 2007

Jan Tschichold



The internet was down all afternoon Ggrrrrr!!%$#?>*>**!!! so I had to choose my next designer the old fashioned way - from a book!! A jump back in history this time. I looked through a few of my design books and settled on Jan Tschichold from my book "Graphic Design in Germany 1890-1945".

Jan Tschichold (1902 - 1974) did some really important work in both design and the education of design, publishing books such as 'Die neue Typographie' and 'The Form of the Book'. He was a practitioner of Modernist design and his books
advocated methods such as the Van de Graaf canon (above), and the Golden Section, (both ways of dividing a page into visually pleasing proportions). A section of Jan Tschichold's historic 'The Form of the Book' can be found here, complete with diagrams.

His most well known work was with Penguin, where managed the redesign of over 500 books, mainly from the Pelican series, leaving behind the 'Penguin Composition Rules'.
Ace Jet 170 has a great range of Pelican and Penguin books on display.

Images from wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold, and the book
Graphic Design in Germany 1890-1945, University of California Press, 2000, Thames and Hudson
xxxx

2 comments:

robot archie said...

Have you seen the work of Boris Artzybasheff?

http://www.eisnermuseum.org/_artzybashoff/main.html

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Artzybasheff

I think you'd be interested in his work.

PS will stop spamming your comments now, loved the form of the book, excellent read!

Anna-Lisa said...

Wow - I just looked up his work. I love it. Cool website too. ALB