Swiss Typography Jasmine Branson

What is Swiss typography? Swiss style is a graphic design style developed in Switzerland in the 50s. The design would be used from grids, sans-serif typeface and ragged text. The style is also associated with photography in place of illustrations or drawings.

Jan Tschichold Jan Tschichold was born in Switzerland and developed the skills of typography and book design as well as being a teacher and writer. The style of typography that Tschichold concentrated on the most was 1950s International Typography Style, better known as Swiss Style which consists of emphasizing cleanliness, readability and objectivity. To obtain this design Tschichold would use a grid, asymmetric layouts, sans-serif typefaces and ragged right text.

Typography created In the late 20s Tschichold designed a ‘universal alphabet’ to clean up the few spellings in the German language, for example he created new characters to replace phrases like ‘ch’ and ‘sch’. The alphabet was then presented into one sans-serif typeface without capital letters. Some of the most famous typography creations from Jan Tschichold were the typefaces of Transit, Saskia and Zeus which were designed in 1931, and Sabon in 1966.

Penguin Books Jan Tschichold also went on to create the design of the famous Penguin Books in the 1940s, using his own typefaces and a consistent theme through out all of the books. Tschichold designed a template for all Penguin books with designated positions for the title and author’s name with a line between the two. He then finally went to produce rules regarding the Penguin books, that the Typographers and Printers were to keep the same style throughout.

Influences Tschichold was influenced by Soviet Constructivism, especially the work of designer El Lissitzky and the Bauhaus exhibition and went on to create and publish the books ‘ Elementary Typography’ in 1925 and ‘The New Typography’ in 1928 which was greatly influenced by the modernist movement. These then both promoted the functional San-serif typeface and were both read among young designers

During this time During the time of Swiss typography, there were other designs going on such as packaging design of Kellogg’s and Budweiser and the front cover of Time Magazine which all concentrated on geometric layout and San-serif typeface of advertising. As of this, you can see clearly that the way other designs have created posters in the same era have effected how Tschichold has created his designs.

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