Thursday, November 21, 2013

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.




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