When we wish to do things well, we often go looking for help in deciding how. This goes for design, as with all other endeavours. If one searches for opinions on good typographic design, one is bound to stumble across those of Jan Tschichold. The problem with Tschichold is that he appears to have changed his opinions over the years. It isn’t always easy to find a clear direction within his many writings. This is not to say that such a direction isn’t there, however.
In his early professional career Tschichold spoke publicly and published articles and books in favour of asymmetric layout using sans serif typefaces. During his thirties Tschichold seems to have discovered a kind of creeping fascism in his own polemics and began to soften his approach. Ironically, at about the same time, the Nazis decided that his work constituted ‘cultural Bolshevism’ and encouraged him to leave Germany. Tschichold emigrated to Switzerland.
Swiss law forbade him, as an immigrant, to work full time as a typographer but this didn’t stop him from writing profusely on the subject. He became one of the foremost authors on typography in the German language and many of his written works have been translated into English and other languages.
Tschichold eventually ended up in England where he continued to write, as well as designing for Penguin books. At Penguin he compiled their house rules for typographic behaviour, which seemed to bear little resemblance to his earlier assertions on choice of typeface and layout style. This upset some of his followers, Max Bill for example, who accused him of getting old and selling out. Upon closer inspection, however, one discerns a common thread in Tschichold’s attention to detail and insistence on quality, which never altered throughout his career.
‘An object cannot possess an inherent aesthetic value’. Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetics and Communication, 1964
Mukarovsky (Czech structuralist) stated that an object cannot have an inherent aesthetic value, rather such values are socially imposed. But what about the Golden Mean and Fibonacci series, for example?
At this point in the talk, I showed a clip created using a simple piece of software, following a Fibonacci number series. It models what happens in nature when the ‘growing tip’ produces seeds in a spiral fashion. Back in the design world, much of Siemens’ new corporate identity is based on Fibonacci series – page formats, type size ranges, colour schemes, even progressions of musical notes are created using this method.
‘Ask a toad what is beauty … He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly, and a brown back’. – Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794 (quoted by Steven Heller in Eye No. 9, Vol. 3, 1993)
Heller went on to explain how Paul Rand described beauty and then how the Cranbrook students who produced the first ‘Output’ publication would describe beauty: ‘chaos born of found letters layered on top of random patterns and shapes’. Heller’s polemic set loose a torrent of commentary in the design press which continues to this day.
Don’t follow only one source, however he or she may be revered. Look outside your own professional sphere, including nature. Analyse carefully what looks good to you and try to figure out why that is. Reflect. And practice, practice, practice.
Jay Rutherford grew up in central Canada, studied graphic design, and worked as a silk-screen printer, sign painter, and teacher. In his mid 30s, he returned to school for a degree in visual communications and later opened his own design studio. Jay taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and worked at MetaDesign in Berlin. He was among the founding members of the Faculty of Art and Design at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Since 2003 he is at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy.