Twenty Faces

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Sabon

Jan Tschichold
1964

Early in his career Jan Tschichold was a shit-disturber of the highest order, writing at length about all that had gone wrong since the industrialization of printing, and in particular of the complacency and mediocrity dogging typography between the wars. He wrote about revolutionary concepts like asymmetrical page layout and reinvention of the alphabet; and for this bolshevism he was incarcerated by the Nazis.

Riding out the war in England, Tschichold worked with Penguin Books to establish design standards, composing manuals and sets of instruction which are as valuable today as fifty years ago. Later on he was no less of a firebrand, but wrote instead about learning from the past, and he became a great scholar and collector of printed and scribal manuscripts.

Just as with Bodoni and Caslon, there is no one font called Garamond. Sabon, which Tschichold designed in 1964, is very true to Claude Garamond’s type design. In its quiet elegance and perfect internal proportions, Sabon, if used well, may be the most legible text face of all, and its digital incarnation is eminently usable.