Week 4 - Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was an important 20th-century German graphic designer who also gave a major movement to the Swiss school. Jan Tschichold attended the “Akademie for Grafische Kunste and Buchgewerbe” in Leipzig from 1919 until 1921. In 1923, Jan Tschichold visited the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar. Influenced by the new Bauhaus typographer, Jan Tschichold began to use serifless typefaces and designed simplified layouts.
In a special 1925 issue of “typgraphische mitteilungen” entitled “elementare typographie”, Jan Tschichold introduced in the form of theses the most important approaches to the new typography design. From 1923, Tschichold freelanced as a commercial graphic artist; his clientele include Insel Verlag Publishers.

From 1926 until 1933, Tschichold taught typography at Paul Renners Master Classes for Book Printers in Munich. He then immigrated to Switzerland, where he worked for several publishers in Basel and taught at the School for the Applied Arts. In 1946, he went to London where he was Art Director at Penguin Books until 1949. He returned to Switzerland in 1950 and worked as a Designer Consultation for the Basel Pharmaceutical company, Hoffmann-La Roche.