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In 1925, in the article Elementaire Typographie, a twenty-three
year old Jan Tschichold wrote of a new typographic standard that was meant as an
introduction for printers to the avant-garde practices of El Lissitzky's pioneering design
work. It spoke of the merits of sans serif type, asymmetric compositions, the benefits
of white space and the limiting of typefaces. It also berated the standards of
nineteenth-century printing and its static visual qualities created by the symmetrical
compositions imposed. This article was a synthetic re-statement of the principles of
elementary, functional, and modern typography being practiced by Lissitzky, Schwitters
and the Bauhaus. These were the “master sources” of the emerging New
Typography. In 1928 Tschichold published Die Neue Typographie which became the
revolutionary textbook for functional typography.7 In publishing Die Neue
Typographie Tschichold introduced, for the first time, a theoretical look at
typography devoid of concerns for printing practicality. Tschichold continued to express
a need for typographic clarity in his 1935 statement: “Typography is the
arrangement of words to be read”8 and “All typography is an
arrangement of elements in two-dimensions”.9 Typographer Hermann
Zapf reiterates Tschichold's statements in 1960 this way: “Typography is
fundamentally two dimensional architecture”.10 |
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