Tschichold Quotes

#1. Penguin Classic, with the orange bands at the top and bottom; and the Gill Sans thirty-sixpoint title, all caps, centered and medium weight, in black on the white band in the middle. One of the designer Tschichold's prouder moments, when he finally woke the hell up and joined the twentieth century.

Chip Kidd

#2. Type production has gone mad, with its senseless outpouring of new types ... only in degenerate times can personality (opposed to the nameless masses) become the aim of human development.

Jan Tschichold

#3. My errors were more fertile than I ever imagined.

Jan Tschichold

#4. The Olympics are coming ... and it's a big problem in American politics, because the problem with holding the Olympics this fall is that we're all going to be focused on the Olympics, and it makes that window of opportunity for Gore to win the election that much smaller.

Susan Estrich

#5. Readers want what is important to be clearly laid out; they will not read what is too troublesome.

Jan Tschichold

#6. The book designer strives for perfection; yet every perfect thing lives somewhere in the neighborhood of dullness and is frequently mistaken for it by the insensitive.

Jan Tschichold

#7. In themselves, experiments are not art. Infinite amounts of energy are wasted because everybody feels he has to make his own start, his own beginning, instead of getting to know what has already been done. It is doubtful that anyone who doesn't want to ...

Jan Tschichold

#8. White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.

Jan Tschichold

#9. Standardization, instead of individualization. Cheap books, instead of private press editions. Active literature, instead of passive leather bindings.

Jan Tschichold

#10. No evil is insupportable but that which is accompanied with consciousness of wrong.

Samuel Johnson

#11. The sanserif only seems to be the simpler script. It is a form that was violently reduced for little children. For adults it is more difficult to read than serifed roman type, whose serifs were never meant to be ornamental.

Jan Tschichold

#12. It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me.

Charles Darwin

#13. When Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born a woman - one becomes one," she didn't know the half of it. In

Caitlin Moran

#14. Asymmetry is the rhythmic expression of funtional design. In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry.

Jan Tschichold

#15. The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements.

Jan Tschichold

#16. One time I went to a hotel. I asked the bellhop to handle my bag. He felt up my wife!

Rodney Dangerfield

#17. I have seen all kinds of things that defy the laws of nature. But I've never seen a monster. Only those that are misunderstood and mistreated.

Amanda Hocking

#18. We cannot alter the essential shape of a single letter without at the same time destroying the familiar printed face of our language, and thereby rendering it useless.

Jan Tschichold

#19. The aim of every typographic work - the delivery of a message in the shortest, most efficient manner.

Jan Tschichold

#20. The world of 'Sherlock Holmes' and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#21. My doctor asked me how many golf balls I had hit in my career. I'm lying there in bed calculating somewhere between four and five million golf balls I had hit to do that on my body.

Greg Norman

#22. Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.

Jan Tschichold

#23. Perfect typography is more a science than an art.

Jan Tschichold

#24. The tear-stained letters of my regret will remain forever unread, for I am never going to be strong enough to give them to you.

Courtney M. Privett