There was a lot of type design going on at the Bauhaus.
Again, experiments in taking the notion of modularity and
structure, and trying to make it work for the alphabet.
Like this is a student project, developing a stencil type, where
a vertical unit that has a kind of radius to edge, creates a set of simple forms.
And here is a student drawing, learning how to design and
draw what is called a Grotesk or a sans-serif letter.
When you look at posters during this time,
a lot of them don't look like they're hand drawn, but they are, and that's because
the students didn't necessarily have access to typesetting of a scale.
And so, the notion of building a letter geometrically out of these same
shapes had this appeal, again, as a kind of constructed letter form,
using the same kind of modularity and simplicity that the architectural
work that was going on, that the Bauhaus had, as well.
And, Herbert Bayer was interested in the idea of trying to
eliminate capital letters in a further simplification of typography.
Maybe you know that in German typesetting, nouns are often capitalized,
and this convention of typesettings seemed old fashioned to Bayer.
And he wanted to come up with what we would now call a unicase,
meaning an alphabet that doesn't have capital letters or lower case letters.
This is one of his drawings, for what he called the Universal Type Design.
As a result, in a lot of Bauhaus printing, you see the use of things like it,
and especially, the elimination of capital letters in typesetting.
But here's Herbert Bayer actually not doing a Bauhaus project, but
this is a poster that he designed for an exhibition on decorative arts in 1927.
And this is a clearly kind of entirely hand drawn font.
It's not his unicase, but you can see, you sense by looking at the letters,
that they're all drawn along the same grid.
The stroke on both the round parts of the letter and
the straight lines of the letter are all the same, and
it has that kind of uniform modularity, which, of course, is exaggerated
by the way he places it on this grid of rectangles of different colors.