grid | 163Jan Tschichold’s book The New Typography, published in Germany in
1928, took ideas from Futurism, Constructivism, and De Stijl and conveyed
them as practical advice for commercial printers and designers. Functionally
zoned letterheads using standard paper sizes were central to Tschichold’s
practical application of modernism. Whereas Futurism and Dada had
aggressively attacked convention, Tschichold advocated design as a means of
discipline and order, and he began to theorize the grid as a modular system
based on standard measures.
By describing the expansion of space in all directions, the modern grid
slipped past the classical frame of the page. Similarly, modern architecture
had displaced the centered facades of classical building with broken planes,
modular elements, and continuous ribbons of windows. The protective
frame became a continuous field.
the new typography
Diagram, 1928
(redrawn). Designer and
author: Jan TschicholdTschichold’s diagram of good and bad magazine design
advocates staggering images in relation to content instead of
forcing text to wrap around blocks moored at the center of
the page. Explaining this experiment, Tschichold wrote that
his redesigned pages would be even more effective if the photo-
graphic halftones (called “blocks”) were produced in fixed
rather than arbitrary sizes.I have intentionally shown blocks of different and “accidental” widths,
since this is what usually has to be contended with (although in the
future, with standard block-sizes, it will happen less often).
—jan tschichold, 1928