In the
visual artists category,
Strange Things Afoot at the Circle K is proud to select
Jan Tschichold, one of the most influential graphic designers ever.
Born in Germany as the son of a signmaker, he learned calligraphic arts at an early age, and began to define his own personal style, looking at what was being done in the Bauhaus and Soviet Constructivist schools, and starting to put them to a more practical use.
As one of the leaders of the new modernist style, he was also responsible for writing and defining a lot of these rules. He pioneered how different weights and dimensions of fonts could be used to convey information and context, as well as the use of grid systems for page layout.
Unfortunately, his interest in constructivist design put him at odds with the fascist movement in Germany, and he was arrested 10 days after the Nazis came to power; his books were on the list of those that must be burned. However, sympathetic people within Germany helped he and his family to escape six months later, and he fled to Switzerland, where he'd spend most of the rest of his life.
His most important contribution to design, however, arguably came just after the war, when he was tasked with overseeing the redesign of a massive catalogue of Penguin Books - some 500 books in total. His work here is still in use today by Penguin, and the Penguin Composition Rules are easily the most influential four-page pamphlet in modern 20th century design.
In later years, he moved away from his hard-line modernist stance and began to re-embrace classicism; his most famous font, Sabon, was a serif and based on Garamond.
By first championing modernism and then rejecting it, he set down a lot of the doctrines on both sides of a design debate that continues today. Just about every book in publication today has been influenced by Tschichold's work and his writing.