Bauhaus: Typography and Advertisement

Founder: Kenneth Brown

Typography and advertising played a large role at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The typographical and advertising designs of the Masters Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, and László Moholy-Nagy, and the students Joost Schmidt, Josef Albers, and Herbert Bayer, demonstrate that the Bauhaus in Weimar was already promoting advertising graphics. The 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition provided the necessity to make an impact in the typographic sector. László Moholy-Nagy introduced elements of a contemporary “elementary typography”.Moholy-Nagy was working toward a scientifically functional design, which overcame purist aesthetics. As head of the workshop for printing and advertising, Herbert Bayer integrated economic, technical, psychological and organisational aspects in a holistic approach. The combination of a printing and advertising workshop, new and unconventional at the time, met the requirements for an uninterrupted sequence from design to execution of a typographic product. Herbert Mayer, like Josef Albers, referred to the simplest geometric elements. He took standards developed elsewhere on paper and type as a starting point for considerations which were oriented towards a complex standardisation of communication media. On this basis, the first advertising designs were produced in the Dessau workshop. This included a Catalogue of Samples, an advertising prospectus of selected Bauhaus products. Functional, and also advertising-technical, psychological, and linguistic criteria made up the background to the choice of type, arrangement of images and typeset design. It was the printing and advertising workshop that initiated the type reform at the Bauhaus. Along with the consequent use of small initial letters, the changes were apparent in the design of the letterhead. Bayer tried to develop a unified appearance for the Bauhaus (he redesigned the business papers of the Bauhaus three times before 1927). The workshop, which was now called the “Advertising Department”, became one of the main workshops of the Bauhaus in 1927 and was henceforth to educate so-called “advertising experts.”