In-house Typefaces
Early visions
These ones were pre-1925, before Bauhaus school got the letterpress workshop. It was chaotic and loose.
In designing the Bauhaus’s 1923 catalog, Moholy-Nagy conveyed his intended layouts and type choices (two sturdy and widely available sans serifs, Breite Grotesk and Venus ) to the printer, who oversaw the details of the typesetting and printing.
Getting the letterpress workshop
Post-1925 typefaces, when typography standards were established
First Bauhaus magazine
The first issue of bauhaus magazine was published in 1926 and designed by Moholy-Nagy. Our exhibition’s co-curator, Henry Cole Smith, dives into its pioneering role in a blog post and two walkthrough videos. The use of sans serif typefaces for various typographic roles is a leap towards simplifying the typography, and the decision became a part of the enduring legacy of the Bauhaus.
Like Aurora, Industria is a plainspoken, multi-weight sans, but its shapes are more geometric and constructed, again emulating architectural forms. Its minimalist use in the Bauhausbücher is in stark contrast to its Gursch foundry specimen, where it is densely typeset and surrounded by ornamentation.
Another sans that found its way into the Bauhausbücher is Grotesque No. 1. Issued by Scottish foundry Miller and Richard in the late 1800s, it was imported to Germany by various foundries.
The body text in most of the Bauhausbücher is set in Genzsch-Antiqua. Like Alt-Mediaeval, it is an “oldstyle” roman, though closer to Jenson’s renaissance-era model and much sharper and cleaner, giving it a more modern air.
More evidence of the foundry jumping on the Bauhaus bandwagon is a specimen called Schriften zur Modernen Typographie (Fonts for a Modern Typography). Along with newly released typefaces, it included older grotesks from the turn of the century, such as Cartolina and Blockschrift, to pad their contemporary inventory. Another grot, Monument, followed Aurora’s superfamily naming technique, applying number labels to its various styles.
Bayer-Type
Like his earlier experiments in geometric letterforms, Bayer’s eponymous Bayer-Type discards any calligraphic origins of the seriffed roman, and reconstructs it in a mechanical way, following the Didone model.
Universal Type - Herbert Bayer
Schablonenschrift
Bauhaus-inspired typefaces
Erbar-Grotesk
One of the first attempts to translate the Bauhaus’s geometric letterform experiments into workable fonts was Erbar Grotesk. The eponymous designer Jakob Erbar was an experienced type maker with many existing designs under his belt. While his typeface was never quite as popular as Futura, it was the first to market, issued by Ludwig and Mayer in 1926.
Futura
On the heels of Erbar-Grotesk, and arguably in development long before it, Futura was released in 1927 by Bauersche Gießerei (Bauer). While Paul Renner was not officially tied to the Bauhaus, he went on to create one of the most successful responses to the school’s ideals.
Kabel
Calligrapher Rudolph Koch took a different approach in his take on the geometric sans serif. Kabel carefully explores the tension between the calligraphic and the mechanical. Unlike Futura, which aimed for nearly strict geometry, Kabel reveals a bit of the pen in its subtle stroke variation and angled terminals.
Phototype Revivals
Fifty years after the Bauhaus dissolved due to Nazi pressure, there was a resurgence in the design concepts of the school. The booming advertising and publishing industries were hungry for new fonts, and phototype suppliers churned out hundreds of new designs every year.
Digital Restorations
The letterform innovations of the Bauhaus continue to inspire type designers. In 2018, Adobe, Erik Spiekermann, and Fedinand Ulrich collaborated on a project inviting several students to transform lesser-known Bauhaus alphabets into fonts.
