L'abécédaire D'un Typographe

Description

Jost Hochuli, Swiss typographer, graphic designer, delivers here 26 reflections - one for each letter of the alphabet - on the issues and personalities that have marked his practice of typography. By turns luminous, confusing, funny, tragic, acerbic, critical, erudite... Jost Hochuli takes advantage of the brevity of the form of the alphabet book - never more than two pages per letter - and the arbitrary choice of subjects to tell an anecdote, to put across an idea that is close to his heart, to fight against aesthetic calligraphy as well as against all-out modernism, to make revelations about Jan Tschichold and the monsters of the history of Swiss typography with whom he rubbed shoulders when he was just starting out. At more than 80 years old, he offers here to graphic designers and typographers, young and old, a concentrate of wisdom and rants, calling on his reader to trust the experience of their eye rather than the dogmatic injunctions of schools. Paradoxically as traditionalist as he is anti-conformist, deviating from the beaten path only to better return to the timeless fundamentals of typography - legibility above all! -Jost Hochuli offers a powerful voice to a stoic modern classicism from book typography.