It must be communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity since this distinguishes the character of our own writing from that of ancient pictographic forms.”
We can see from this quote from Moholy-Nagy’s essay on the New Typography, which was published in 1923, where Tschichold’s influences may have come from. The two clearly share the same basic view on how typography should be addressed.
Moholy-Nagy was more notably a painter and photographer than a typographer and focused more of his work on typophoto; the combination of text and image rather than working purely with type, whereas Tschichold, who was already well versed in the ways of letterforms by the time he discovered the Bauhaus in 1923, technically far more so than any of the masters at the Bauhaus at the time, naturally immersed himself in this new typography and progressed the concept further and in more depth.
He did this because he felt it was essential that these new ideas were taught and practiced by all typographers and printers from there on so that all printed matter was as coherent as it was aesthetically pleasing, as Ruairi McLean points out
…show more content…
All of these elements are core to his statement that “The aim of typographic layout is communication. Communication must appear in the shortest, simplest, most penetrating form”.
I will now investigate these aspects using examples as evidence to try and determine what truth there is in this quote.
The first example I am going to look at is Herbert Bayer’s ‘Universal’ alphabet. Bayer studied at the Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy amongst others and became director of printing and advertising at the school. In line with the radical new ideas of how design was to be addressed, something had to change in the way of typefaces. Black letter type was the most popular at the time but its “archaic form clearly did not belong to the machine