Typography Book

Claude Garamond Jan Tschichold

Book Readability vs. Legibility Bierut, Michael. Looking Closer. New York: Allworth Press and American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1994.

Carter, Rob; Ben Day and Phillip Meggs. Typographic Design: Form and Communication. New York:Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1985.

Doubleday, Richard. "Bird in Hand." Print May-June 2005: 76-83.

Lawson, Alexander S. Anatomy of a Typeface. London: David R. Godine Publisher, 1990.

Meggs, Phillip B. A History of Graphic Design. Fourth Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006.

Book Readability vs. Legibility Claude Garamond Jan Tschichold

Tschichold, Jan. The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design.

Translated by Hajo Hadeler. Washington: Hartley & Mark Publishers, Inc., 1975.

Tschichold, Jan. The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers.

Translated by Ruari McClean. Berkely and LosAngeles, California, University of California Press Ltd. 1995.

Adobe Garamond Pro 9/12 Gill Sans MT 9-60

Samantha Thomas

Samantha Thomas

Jan The visual qualities of type are created based on the designer’s problem solving of technological innovations, current socioeconomic and political patterns, aesthetic choices, and historical influences. These sets of motivations influenced designers such as Claude Garamond in his formation of the sixteenth century Garamond face, and Jan Tschichold in his role as a designer both in the modernist sense and the classical revivalist mode. Tschichold’s contrasting schools of thought in his design career emphasized the fact that designers should draw upon the whole history of design to create solutions expressing content. In contrasting Claude Garamond and Jan Tschichold it becomes evident on how the progressions of typography heavily rely on long classical traditions of readability and legibility and are transformed to suit the trends of the contemporary world.

Jan Tschichold earned his distinction in his influential 1928 manifesto, Die Neue Typographie, where he advocated that a multitude of traditional roman fonts be replaced with a limited number of sans-serif faces. The principle claim of the manifesto was for new typography to be characteristic and mirror the modern age.

The late 1920s marked a period of industrialization where a growing

number of mass produced products were appearing on the market. It was Tschichold’s intention to bring typography into line with these other manifestations of industrial culture.

Similar to Russian Constructivists, Tschichold followed the idea that the engineer shapes our age through their work marked by “economy, precision and use of pure constructional forms that correspond to the functions of the object.”

He felt that printing must facilitate a quicker more efficient mode of reading. Where the aim of older, classical type was beauty; clarity was the purpose of new typography. Thus new type as recorded in his manifesto was:

1 essentially simple and pure design in harmony with the modern world.

2 asymmetrical replaced symmetrical because it was more functional reflecting the more complex rhythms of the modern age.

3 only sans serif type faces were efficient communicators of modern information, where serifs had been designated to historicists scrap heaps.

4 greater emphasis was to be brought by using different weights of type rather than different faces and even point sizes.

The Garamond typeface became highly reproduced due to its guaranteed elegance, warmth, readability and legibility, which made it ideal for book faces. The design is also appropriate for lines of continuous text as found in magazines, newspapers, or annual reports. Jan Tschichold recognized the readability and legibility as demonstrated in Claude Garamond’s creation of the serif face, Garamond and its particular importance and influence “there are some things that in book design. Tschichold being also from the twentieth century recoghave long since reached nized also the need for sans-serif faces to accommodate the industrial, perfection in form…the mechanical and mass advertising book…completed its needed to inform the growing consumer populous. Jan Tschichold is an development long ago.” example of contrasts. His works call

-Tschichold on the modernist and classical type and in doing so he blends the knowledge of history with the present. He emulated Claude Garamond in recognizing the technologies of his time and the need to alter the way in which type was created and in doing so created a standard, legible typeface that is drawn upon and remains highly used and influential to this day. As Tschichold demonstrated, nothing new remains forever and the appearance of typography will continue to change while calling upon influences of the past and present (Tschichold, 8).

Aa ee

The unique characteristics of Garamond typeface include the small bowl of the “a” and the small eye of the “e”. While the long extenders and top serifs have downward slopes the baseline serifs tend to be long, slightly cupped, and have soft rounded ends. The character stroke-weight stress is canted with the heaviest parts at the two and eight o’clock positions. A dead give-away for spotting the Garamond face is the bidirectional serifs on top of the capital “T”. When Garamond died in 1561 his punches and matrices were sold to Christopher Plantin, who in turn allowed the Garamond font to be used by many printers, thus the huge family of the Garamond face; branching into two distinct schools of type, the European and the American (Meggs, 2006). Garamond’s roman is still considered one of the most influential classic typefaces. Its influence in typography is evident with the many twentieth century type designers around the world who redrew their own versions of Garamond’s typeface. Sabon was designed by Tschichold in 1964 based on the sixteenth century typefaces of Garamond.

Sabon was produced jointly by three foundries D. Stempel AG, Linotype, and Monotype. This partnership was in response to a request by German master printers to make a typeface family of the same design of all three metal type technologies of the time; foundry type for hand composition, linecasting, and singletype machine composition. The name of the type was after Jacob Sabon, a student of Claude Garamond (Lawson 151). The type is thus a version of Garamond due to its characteristics of Old Style letterforms. Its originality lies in its resolution of technical problems of three different sets of body-widths needed for three different typesetting systems. “It is important for type designers to comprehend the nature and capabilities of typographic technologies, for this understanding provides a basis for a thoughtful blending of design and production” (Carter 223).

Years later he changed his mind and later wrote it was a mistake to ignore the visual tradition of the book. There was no need to change it fundamentally because “there are some things that have long since reached perfection in form…the book…completed its development long ago” (Tschichold 178).

Tschichold, as indicated in his manifesto was concerned with how people read. He preferred asymmetrical layouts and orderly precision instead of centered arrangements of classical book printing. “I attempt to reach the maximum of purpose in my publicity works and to connect the single constructive elements harmoniously to design.”

One of his greatest contributions was to the redesign of Penguin Books in the 1940s, where he revolutionized typographic conventions.

The design of Penguin Books fell short of their literacy reputation.

Tschichold established a consistency and balance for the company’s image. Adherence to the tenets of traditional typography; a balance in type styles, contrast, and simplicity were integral to a books function in legibility. He preferred classical typefaces for long pages of text, noting,

Tschichold

“good typography has to be perfectly legible and is, as such, the result of intelligent planning. The classical typefaces such as Garamond, Jenson, Baskerville, and Bell are undoubtedly the most legible” (Doubleday 76).

To help with the designs of Penguin Book he created the Penguin Composition Rules, which standardized formats and typographic specifications for publications. The grid system became an underlying rule, which gave Tschichold the flexibility to create appropriate scale relationship between type size the dimension of each book. Tschichold’s revisions to Penguin Books came in three key revelations. The first stage he introduced the different weights of Monotype Gill Sans to create hierarchy and emphasis through meticulous letter and word spacing for the author’s name and title set amidst a warmer toned orange background (Doubleday 81). The second set of revisions came in the Penguin logo and he also reduced the point size of the typography and introduced a four-point line between the title and author’s name. The final stage in 1949 not only modified the Penguin trademark, but also he corrected the letter spacing and reduced its overall size for improved proportion. The final set of revisions firmly established a standardized format that unified the Penguin series and would hold as the foundation for future books.

Tschichold raised issue and awareness on how best to serve the text.

He saw the value of new typography as an attempt at purification, clarity and simplicity of means. He was able to bring typographic expression to fruition for the twentieth century. In his later work he shifted back to symmetrical organization and classical serif type styles. His revival of classical typography restored the humanist tradition of book design as he drew on the knowledge and accomplishments of masters, such as Claude Garamond to redefine twentieth century typography (Meggs 2006).

Claude

Claude Garamond has been long regarded as one of the type designers for excellence that followed the century of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Using Aldus Manutiu’s roman type as inspiration Garamond cut his first letters for a 1530 edition of Erasmus. His roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print blocks of extraordinary legibility and beauty. The fonts Garamond cut during the 1540s achieved a mastery of visual form and a tighter fit that allowed closer word spacing and a harmony of design between capitals, lowercase letters, and italics. It was the development of these types that allowed for books like the French-language Poliphii, printed by Jacques Kerver, 1546, to be printed and to maintain their status as influential benchmarks in typographic beauty and readability to this day (Meggs 2006). Garamond’s work reflected the shift in the influence of writing as a model into typography that was evolving a language of form rooted in the processes of making steel punches, casting metal type and printing instead of imitating forms created by hand gestures to develop a unique, lasting, and global typeface that has been revitalized even to this day.

1490

Claude Garamond Born

1530

Garmond cuts his first letters.

1546

Due to his typeface French language book Poliphii was printed.

1561

Claude Garamond dies.

1902

1928

1940-9 1964

Jan Redesigns Tschichold Penguin Born books.

Tschichold Designs publishes Sabon Die Neue Typeface.

Typographie which advocated asymmetrical layouts and sans serif typography.

Garamond