A Note on the Type

I T IS IMPORTANT to look at everything through the lens of The Creator Mindset, and typography is no exception. Typography is basically the craft of producing letters, numbers, and symbols. There are probably millions of type sets, but the one chosen for this book is Sabon, a typeface designed by Jan Tschichold in 1967.¹ Tschichold created this typeface just seven years before his death in 1974,² and it stands today as one of the world’s most beloved type settings. Sabon is characterized by elegance, beautiful serif subtleties, and impactful readability. With Sabon, Tschichold was trying above all to emphasize function.³

Today it may seem passé to talk about type, but in 1933 Tschichold’s idea of a type that would empathize function was seen as revolutionary. It was perceived as such a grave threat by the Nazi Party that his home and his belongings in Munich were ransacked, he was called a Soviet sympathizer, and he was thrown in jail for six weeks.⁴ All this only 10 days after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. That’s how high he was on the Nazi hit list for producing the ideas that led to the typeface you are reading today, the ideas that form these very words and letters.

There were originally three weights Tschichold created for Sabon: normal, italic, and semibold, all of which are in use in various pages of this book.⁵ This typeface has improved the look and feel of this book in immeasurable ways. Tschichold once said:

To remain nameless and without specific appreciation, yet to have been of service to a valuable work and to the small number of visually sensitive readers—this, as a rule, is the only compensation for the long, and indeed never-ending, indenture of the typographer.⁶