Jan Tschinchold

Jan Tschinchold may be best known for the creation of the Sabon font, however, he was also a teacher, writer, and designer. Primarily trained in calligraphy, Tschinchold developed various work habits which set him apart from other typographers at the time. For instance, in his early years, he never used custom fonts, and he always preferred to use commercially produced hand paper, throughout his career, rather than hand made paper.
After visiting the first Bauhaus exhibit in the early 1920’s, Tschinchold devoted his intrests to modern design. This eventually resulted in the publication of his most notable book, Die neue Typography. In this book he advocates only serif fonts which is a bit ironic seeing how Sabon was in fact, a san-serif font. Other than this, the book also goes into detail about a number of his other design principles but puts a large emphasis on their application to book design. For example, Tschinchold strongly disliked centered type.
Tschinchold, originally from Germany, was tagged as a communist at the start of the Nazi’s rise to power. He was arrested, and the Nazis began to burn his books including Die neue Typography. Nevertheless, he somehow managed to flee to Switzerland, where he spent the majority of the rest of his life. He did, however, live in England for a short while where he worked for Penguin Books. While there, he redesigned hundreds of their books, leaving Penguin with a set of ground rules for typography. The company called it the Penguin Composition Rules. It was after his presence at Penguin that Tschinchold created Sabon. It does seem a bit odd that the designers most renown font happens to be a serif font, after he wrote a book which made a point to criticize all typefaces of that nature. However, he did, a few decades after the publication of Die neue Typography confess that he thought the book may have been a little too radical. Also, Sabon does happen to be a less elaborate serif font. Regardless, it is the only serif font Tschinchold created. He was also responsible for the production of the Transit and Saskia font’s, but those were finished much earlier in his career.