Due to his extraordinary achievements, he soon became a master pupil of the rector of Walter Tiemann, a type designer with the Gebr.-Klingspor foundry, and was given the task of teaching his fellow students.

At the same time, he received the first orders as part of the Leipzig Trade Fair and in 1923 set up his own business as a typographic consultant to a print shop.

Although, up to this moment, he had only worked with historical and traditional typography, he radically changed his approach after his first visit to the Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar.

[5] After being introduced to important artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and others who were carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography.

After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism.

He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement mentioned above); then a 1927 personal exhibition; then with his most noted work Die neue Typographie.

This book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography, which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany.

[13] Although he gave Penguin's books (particularly the Pelican range) a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed the nature of each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages.

His abandonment of Modernist principles meant that, even though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss International Typographic Style.