12. Bauhaus Typography

The Bauhaus School existed in Germany during the lull between WWI and WWI. (Please note: there is an expanded section about the Bauhaus on this site)

Initially typography was of limited importance but with the appointment of Moholy-Nagy in 1923, the ideas of the "New Typography" began to infiltrate the Bauhaus. Nagy considered typography to be primarily a communications medium, and was concerned with the "clarity of the message in its most emphatic form." He combined text and photography into interrelated compositions of pure communication he named "Typofoto."

Herbert Bayer

Austrian Herbert Bayer was trained in the Art Nouveau style but soon was converted by the Bauhaus-Manifest. He enrolled in and studied at the Bauhaus for four years and, after passing his final examination, Bayer was appointed by the Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius, to head the new "Druck und Reklame" (printing and advertising) workshop planned for the next Bauhaus in Dessau.

In 1925, Gropius commissioned Bayer to design a typeface for all Bauhaus communications and Bayer excitedly undertook this task. He used his approach to modern typography to create an "idealist typeface." The result was "universal" - a simple geometric sans-serif font. In Bayer's design, not only were serifs unnecessary, he felt there was no need for an upper and lower case for each letter. Part of his rationale was to simplify typesetting and the typewriter keyboard layout.

The Bauhaus set forth elementary principles of typographic communication:

1. Typography is shaped by functional requirements.

2. The aim of typographic layout is communication (for which it is the graphic medium). Communication must appear in the shortest, simplest, most penetrating form.

3. For typography to serve social ends, its ingredients need internal organization - (ordered content) as well as external organization (the typographic material properly related).

Shown above: Laszo-Maholy-Nagy, Catalog with samples of student work from the Bauhaus in Dessau.

Joseph Albers

Albers (1886-1976) was both a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus. Principally an abstract painter, Albers also was a designer and typographer.

His Kombinationschrift alphabet was a modular lettering system based upon 10 basic shapes derived from a circle and a square. it was designed to be efficient’Äî both easy to learn and inexpensive to produce.
The result was not a legible as Bayer's but the idea of modularity was in line with the school philosophy of creating streamlined objects for mass production.

Elsewhere in Germany, Paul Renner designed a completely geometric typeface, Futura in 1927. Originally drawn entirely with t-square and compasses, it was later revised for commercial setting.