Max Bill - Swiss Designer

Max bill born in Winterthur, Switzerland 1908, he was an architect, painter, typographer, industrial designer, engineer, sculptor, educator, and graphic designer. In the beginning he was a student at the kunstgewerbeschule and apprenticed as a silversmith before beginning his studies in 1927 at the Bauhaus in Dessau under the guidance of Kandinsky, Klee and Schlemmer. Bill had settle permanently in Zurich in 1929 and in 1937 he became involved with the group of swiss artist and designers named the Allianz. This group advocated the concrete theories of art and design, which Max Huber, Leo Leuppi and Richard Lohse was also members.

In 1950, him and Otl Aicher founded the Ulm school of design (Hochschule fur Gestaltung-HfG Ulm) in Ulm, Germany, a design school that was mainly inspired from the Bauhaus, that was notable for its inclusion and semiotics. Bill was with the vision that “It is possible to develop an art largely on the basis of mathematical thinking.” Over, the 1967-71 period, Bill taught at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Hamburg and he was also the chair of environmental design.

As a graphic designer, he embraced the tenets and philosophical views of this modernist movement. His work majorly was based solely on cohesive principles of oraginization and composed of forms, his designs look rather simple, but if we had to analyze it today we find modular grids, san serif typography, asymmetric compositions, linear spatial divisions, mathematical progressions, and dynamic figure–ground relationships.  

Josef Müller-Brockmann

Josef Müller-Brockmann born in 9^th may is considered on of the key players in the swiss achool of international style. One may consider the era of his career, which was during the World War 2, the cold war and the growing influence of a Europe on the mend from fear and destruction. He did not influence swiss designers but all of them in a global scale. It was a time for many nations to rebirth again from ruins of the brutality of the war.

Müller-Brockmann was more than just a man who sought to form what is now labeled the swiss school; constructivism, de still, suprematism and offcourse the Bauhaus, of which all push his designs in a new direction for creative expression in graphic design. When looking at that time, he is the most recognized amongst all other graphic designers.

Some say that his most recognized work was done for the zurich town hall as poster advertisements. His work was rather graphic that illustrative, even some critics say that these posters created a mathematical harmony, in terms of harmony of the music. If one studies poster before that time, they would propably all agree that these are a bold and different way to play to visual messages when dealing with music. He even influenced jazz and fusion albums in America at that time.

The Grid System was the prioritization and arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements with meaningful use of colors, set into order, based from left to right and top to bottom. It’s two dimensional structure made up from different intersecting vertical and horizontal axes used to structure the content. The grid will serve as an armature on which he can organize the text and image in a rotational for an easy manner.

Bauhaus moving to Dessau

Dessau not much further from Berlin in 1926, walter Gropius build his higher academy for arts, the Bauhaus. For the inhabitants of dessae the building that rose up before their eyes was a peculiar thing, with it’s glass walls, right angles and flat roofs. Is one of the most famous buildings in the history of the 20^th century architecture.

On December 4^th 1926 hundreds of people came for the inauguration of it’s opening. The Bauhaus seemed to be a symbol of renewed hope recovered by vitality, 8 years after the tragedy of the Great War. Exhibition, concerts and theatrical performances followed one another for over two days. Politician, artists and chairmen, crowed around Walter Gropius. At 43 the architecture of the Bauhaus was also it’s director.

It’s all began in 1919 in viemar, in a pre existent public building without any particular architecture or merit. Founded by Gropius the Bauhaus movement which latterly means the art of building aimed to reconcile arts and craft to create a new industrial aesthetic, what we now call design. Every discipline was mobilized, metalworking, joinery and painting, but also stagecraft and dance. Color was taught in workshops run by paul clay and Kandinsky. Electrical appliances and furniture that continued to mark our daily lives were designed there and experimental films were made too.

In 1925 It was forced to shut down due to some political election that been won. In the other hand in Dessau the city council with it’s social democratic majorities released founds for the construction of the new home for the school that would give it a fresh lease on life. The city with its 70,000 inhabitants was an important industrial centre. Dessau was the perfect location for the encounter between the esthetic avant-garde and heavy industry.

The Bauhaus cannot be comprehended from a single angle, the building recuires movement to be understood, when the pedestrians start walking around it and looking for the school entrance will only find a discreet door that seems to denial that it’s best centre of architecture is there. On one side you find the higher academy for the arts, and on the other side you find the technical school that was required by the city council, although here the architecture is less complete and prestigious than the other parts of the school. In the middle you find the collective area were everyone including students and lectures were to meet for leisure’s and performances.  And in the last part we find the housing for the students, a 24 studio flats on four floors, the highest section of the building. In the centre of the building there’s the school administration as well as the directors office.

Herbert bayer and the new sans serif typefaces

A couple of years after when the Bauhaus was moved to Dessau, he was appointed head of new department of typography and advertising. He influence was immediately noticed as he used the Bauhaus publications as a vehicle to drive his typographic ideas. In 1925 he advocated the use of sans serif typefaces as the typographic expression of the age and with his geometric universal alphabet.

He was one of the first generation of the Bauhaus students studying under lazlo, moholy-nagy and Kandinsky, he replaced the tendency towards decorative components in design, and championed the exclusive use of lowercase types, all giving the Bauhaus publications their distinct characters. His graphic designs of the late 1920’s and 30’s were also inspiring due to his integration of photography and typography. Bayer was the leading advocate of the sans serif typefaces, which had become the typographic expression of modernity.

For the cover of the school exhibition, Herbert bayer (an advaced student of moholy-nagy and Kandinsky) used rough, hand drawn letters, dividing words into blocks of red and blue while condensing and stretching some forms and sapacing to make the lines equal in length. In bayer’s division of colored letters he contracted hard line principles of uniformity by making the division of red and blue to appear random, so drawing our eye even further to the words.

Herbert Bayer and the Bank Notes of Thuringia

Herbert Bayer and the Bank Notes of Thuringia 

At this young age, he quickly developed into a designer of wide-ranging abilities, designing a bold, functional typographic banknotes (inflation currency) for the state bank of Thuringia in 1923.

These were a set of eight notes, letterpress on paper. Banknotes designed for the State Bank of Thuringia by Herbert Bayer in 1923. The plain sans serif typography exemplifies the Bauhaus aesthetic. Each note measured approx. 7.0 cm x 13.8 cm | 2.25"h x 5.5"w.

The banknotes can be found in various collections, one of them is the Moma collection.

In 1923 World War I devastated the German economy and reparations made for rampant inflation. Hyperinflation set in and, as prices rose exponentially, common currency became worthless. To meet the demand of the paper notes, they were printed almost nightly in every region, jumping from thousands to millions to billions. These notes are known as Notgeld, or “emergency money.”

Herbert Bayer at this young age of 23, he was called upon to design a series of notgeld for Thuringia, a liberal stronghold and then capital of Germany. Virtually overnight (accounts vary from one to three days), Bayer created a full range of bank-notes. The results are stunning examples of modernist design, shining the light of rational thinking forward rather than seeking comfort in the past.

Clarity and immediacy were the first priority. The typography is dominated by the use of sans serif. In big, beautiful, arabic numerals the value of each note is the most prominent element, awash in a field of optimistic light color, reprising rather playfully as patterning on each side. The content is blocked in an orderly grid, rotating 90° to place the text naturally aside.

The only non-typographic element present is a modestly scaled crest of the Weimar Republic, with the sole purpose to serve as the official seal. No other work in the canon of modernist design so clearly delivers on the principles of Bauhaus modernism: honesty, functionality, and beauty.

Introduction of Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer 1900-85

Herbert was born in 1900 in Austria, through his life he practiced in graphic and exhibition design, architecture, photography and painting. He was also pioneered modernism in Europe, as well in America. Before moving to Darmstadt, he was apprenticed to the architect Schmidthammer in Linz in 1920 and after went to work for the architect Emmanuel Margold. From 1921 till 1923 he studied at the famous Bauhaus school, he was also apprentice of Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy 



reference

Livingston, A. I., 2003. Graphic Design and Designers. London: The Thames & Hudson.