Typefaces
Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. For example, he devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs ch and sch. His intentions were to change the spelling by systematically replacing eu with oi, w with v, and z with ts. Long vowels were indicated by a macron below them, though the umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.
Typefaces Tschichold designed include:
- Transit (1931)
- Saskia (1931/1932)
- Zeus (1931)
- Sabon (1966/1967) -, named after Jacques Sabon.
Sabon was designed to be a typeface that would give the same reproduction on both Monotype and Linotype systems. It was used early after its release by Bradbury Thompson to set the Washburn College Bible. A “Sabon Next” was later released by Linotype as an ‘interpretation’ of Tschichold's original Sabon.
Read more about this topic: Jan Tschichold