Typography

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From the course by California Institute of the Arts

Ideas from the History of Graphic Design

875 ratings

California Institute of the Arts

Ideas from the History of Graphic Design

875 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Graphic Design

This condensed survey course focuses on four key periods or themes from the history of design. Together we’ll trace the emergence of design as a recognized practice, why things look the way they do, and how designers approached specific design problems in their work. Each week, a short quiz will test your knowledge of concepts, and a short reflective assignment will give you the opportunity to analyze the questions designers ask themselves today. This is an essential course for emerging designers entering the field, or for students interested in learning more about visual culture and analysis. No previous experience is required.

From the lesson

The Bauhaus

This week, we'll look at how the work and teachings of The Bauhaus (1919-1933), and how design emerged as a recognized practice.

Color & Image3:11

Textiles & Ceramics1:46

Publications3:07

Meet the Instructors

Louise Sandhaus
Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art
Lorraine Wild
Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art

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.

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