Jost Hochuli

Jost Hochuli was born on 8 June 1933 in St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland, the city where he would live and work for the rest of his life. From 1952 to 1954 he attended the school of arts and crafts in St. Gallen. He then spent a year, from 1954 to 1955, as a trainee with the typographer Rudolf Hostettler at the Zollikofer and Co. printing house, who introduced him to typography.

With Hostettler's encouragement he trained as a compositor from 1955 to 1958, partly at Zollikofer and partly in the typesetting class of the Zurich School of Applied Arts, where he also took lettering courses with Walter Kaech. In 1958 and 1959 he lived in Paris and attended courses given by the type designer Adrian Frutiger at the Ecole Estienne.

Back in St. Gallen, Hochuli opened his own studio for commercial graphics in 1959, concentrating at first on industrial and institutional work. Over time book design became the centre of his practice, and it was for his books that he became known both in Switzerland and abroad. Many of them were chosen among the Most Beautiful Swiss Books and the Most Beautiful Books from All Over the World.

In 1979 he was one of the founders of the VGS publishing cooperative in St. Gallen, a small press devoted mainly to local and regional subjects. He served as its president from its founding until 2004 and was responsible for the design of its books until 2011. As editor and designer he produced the Edition Typotron series from 1983 to 1998 and the Edition Ostschweiz from 2000.

Hochuli was also an influential writer on his craft. His book Detail in Typography, first published in 1987, examines the letter, letter spacing, the word, word spacing, the line, line spacing and the column, and was translated into more than ten languages. He also wrote Designing Books: Practice and Theory with Robin Kinross, Book Design as a School of Thought, and a survey of book design in Switzerland for the cultural foundation Pro Helvetia, and he edited a 1976 catalogue on the life work of Jan Tschichold. He curated and designed the exhibitions Book Design in Switzerland and Book Design in St. Gallen, which were shown in many European cities and in the United States and Canada.

He taught for decades. From 1967 to 1980 he was a part-time lettering teacher at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, succeeding Walter Kaech, apart from a six-month study visit to England in 1968. From 1980 to 1996 he taught lettering at the St. Gallen School of Design and led its part-time course for typographic designers. In 1988 he declined a professorship in typography at the University of Essen. In 2010 he founded the type foundry abc litera with the typographers Roland Stieger and Jonas Niedermann, which issued his sans serif typeface Allegra; in 2012 the city of St. Gallen gave him a recognition prize for it. He continued to give lectures, seminars and workshops in Switzerland and abroad into old age.

Hochuli was married to Ursula Hochuli-Gamma. Speaking at a celebration of his 90th birthday at the St. Gallen School of Design in November 2023, he thanked friends, former students and workshop participants for coming, and thanked his wife for her great support over the years. Colleagues often described him as modest, curious and open to new ideas. For his 90th birthday, Doris Ueberschlag, Rupert Kalkofen and Roland Stieger published Typobiografie, an overview of 60 years of his work compiled by Hochuli himself, which appeared in German, French, English and Italian and was also published in Korea.

Jost Hochuli died on Sunday 18 October 2026, aged 93. His death was made public in a notice in the St. Galler Tagblatt on 21 October 2026 from his wife, Ursula Hochuli-Gamma, and his family, which read: "He enriched our lives." No cause of death was given. Swiss media reported his death the same day, describing him as one of the most formative figures in modern Swiss typography and noting that many professionals regarded Detail in Typography as the typography bible.

With Rudolf Hostettler, Hochuli is credited with putting St. Gallen on the typographic map. Detail in Typography remains in print in many languages and is still used in design education, including at the St. Gallen School of Design where he taught. His work archive, including sketches and drawings for his lettering and for the Allegra typeface as well as work by his students, has been held since 2017 at the St. Gallen Centre for the Book in the Vadiana cantonal library. Generations of designers, in Switzerland and as far away as South Korea, have cited him as an influence, particularly for his attention to regional and local typography.