take that

Towards the end of his life, he listed “Ten common mistakes in the production of books,” the first of which was “Books which are needlessly large, needlessly wide, and needlessly heavy.” This volume is guilty as charged, a monument of overblown, wasteful design, with thin texts leaded out widely to make them seem longer, and unnecessary part-titles, backed with pages covered with nothing but a repetition of the initials JT. Brief quotes from the master are given a full page and set in a huge size of type. Tschichold wrote at length on correctly-proportioned margins for text pages: the half-inch foot margin used here would scarcely have occurred in his worst nightmares. The openings of paragraphs are not indented, as he explicitly demanded, but space is inserted between the paragraphs, which he explicitly condemned. Indeed, he ascribed these two faults to the way typists were trained by business schools, who are “utterly incompetent when it comes to questions of typography.”

Design Observer on Jan Tschichold — Master Typographer: His life, work and legacy