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. ("textism")

It was asymmetric, because symmetry involved putting words and sentences into shapes which were decorative and artificial,and had nothing to do with their meaning, and were therefore false. Asymmetry, also, was dynamic and not static; it was therefore in harmony with the age. It’s type-face was sans serif, because in sans the forms of letters were shorn of inessentials and striped down to their basic, elemental shapes.

Tschichold was the first to formulate these theories into a system and to show how the ‘modernist’ movement in art could be related to ordinary printing. Printing, like architecture, touches every civilized person at almost every point of their lives, and Tschichold, working in Germany up to 1933, took daily printing, or at least a large part of it, into the twentieth century. ("The New Typography::Translated from German by Ruari McLean")