Jan Tschichold and the old new typography
It’s a strange time to be making a magazine. Last week I talked to Rob Orchard, the editorial director of Delayed Gratification — a mag I really admire and, frankly, aspire to — for a piece for The Drum, about how print titles across the industry are coping and adapting (there’s also a bigger feature here).
The problems Rob talked about — distribution networks imploding, shops shut and copies sitting in warehouses — are being felt across the industry. While Delayed Gratification has not been delayed going out of the door, I did get the sense that the team behind it had used the last few weeks to pause and fine-tune their operation.
We’ve done the same with Counterpoint. Locked in, we’ve spent hours and hours poring over almost every detail of the next issue. It’s finished, in fact — ready to be shunted through the Risograph in lurid pink, purple and teal. But, locked out of the printing studio, we still don’t know how soon we’ll be able to ship it to our readers.
One of the things we reviewed was our use of type. The amount of different weights we regularly used throughout the magazine had built up over time, so we cut those down to just three, allowing us to spend less time tinkering with tracking values and more time perfecting headline puns.
With the mag finished and no commute, I’ve had more reading time on my hands — and in a stroke of luck, I finally found a reasonably priced copy of Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography, which I’d been after for years.
It’s an odd book — a design manifesto later discarded by its author for its zealotry. But even if it’s an artefact more than it is a resource, I think it’s fascinating, and relevant today.
Fascinating, because it’s a snapshot in a brief and important career; Tschischold went from artisan, to acolyte, to artist in the span of about eight years prior to his detention and flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, and The New Typography is a summary of his thinking and that of his fellow typographers as they were gathering momentum.
Much of the first part of the book, as the foreword by Robin Kinross notes, borrows the language of modernist manifestos of the time, in particular the idea that designers of type raise themselves to the challenges posed by the brave new world emerging in the 20s. Tschichold highlights how type could elevate the media of that new world: of display advertising, cinema posters (seen above and below), direct mail and quaintly, letters — he spends a great many pages concerned with how to create a perfect letterhead.
Fittingly, he’s a champion of sans serif as the type for this new world, the vehicle that would allow designers to “achieve a typography which expresses the spirit of modern man.” The guiding principle of the New Typography, he writes, is:
“Utmost clarity… necessary today because of the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression.”
It’s relevant, in part because typography has played (and still plays) such a huge but discrete role in determining the shape of the internet. The architecture of the web, of Google and Apple (think Steve Jobs’ apocryphal calligraphy classes), of Microsoft Outlook and Instagram Story captions, rests upon typographic choices. Gifted dozens of type faces by Microsoft Office’s drop-down catalogue, everyone’s a typographer for as long as it takes to format a document. Incidentally, Tschichold quotes El Lissitzky’s Topography of Typography, which calls for the creation of an “electro-library” that would enable designers to transcend the limits of the printed page.
Tschichold believed that type should bear as few makers’ marks as possible, to elide the personality of the designer and prioritise efficiency above all else (however that might be defined). The typefaces he recommends in the book are:
“Easily legible, above all in a technical sense useful and free from personal idiosyncrasies — in the best sense of the word, uninteresting.”
Perhaps, in the copyright free-for-all of today’s web — the endless, authorless library of 1001freefonts.com — the default of the anonymously designed typeface has been realised.
