The five lost typefaces had laid undiscovered for almost 90 years.
But now, the unfinished sketches and letter fragments from Bauhaus Dessau, the world’s most influential school of design, have been carefully reimagined by digital experience company, Adobe.
A team of experts have turned the newly completed lettering into digital typeface sets, available for the next generation of creatives to download and use.
The first four completed typefaces – Alfarn, CarlMarx, Joschmi and Xants – are available to download in Typekit, where they sync to Adobe Creative Cloud desktop and mobile apps, and can be used with tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Comp CC, or as web fonts. The remaining recovered typeface – Reinhold Rossig – will be made available over the coming months.
Restoring and completing the typefaces was a painstaking process, because the students who worked on their completion had to second-guess how the original creators intended their finished typefaces to look.
However, design professionals have already been putting the new typefaces to good use. Rufus Deuchler, Adobe’s principal manager of Creative Cloud evangelism at Adobe, recently spent two days live-streaming from Paris alongside designers working with the new typefaces.
And although it’s too soon to draw conclusions about how the typefaces might be used, Deuchler is excited about spotting them “in the wild”. He’s also unequivocal about the implications of the fonts for the future of storytelling and design.
“All of the ways designers work today is based, knowingly or not knowingly, on ideas that stem from the Bauhaus – it’s the birthplace of design,” he says.
“So it’s very exciting to see technology harnessed in ways that enable a new generation to learn about the Bauhaus and its place in the history of design.”
Ged Palmer, a London-based lettering artist with more than 15 years’ experience of working with letterforms, was approached by Adobe to begin working with the revitalised fonts.
He says he was “honoured” to be asked to work with the new rendering of the Bauhaus typefaces. “Most of my inspiration comes from the ‘golden era’ of design, the 1920s to the 50s, when modernism blew all the ornate fussiness of the late 1800s completely out the water and stripped things back to wonderfully clean geometric forms with plenty of white space – there was something so honest and playful about this early modernist work,” he says.
Type design, much like architecture, was traditionally produced by hand, on a draftsman’s table. Palmer specialises in designing lettering in this way, and has worked on logo development for clients such as Best Western and Beefeater Gin, splitting his time between commercial lettering and traditional sign painting and gold leaf work, creating work for local shop fronts and restaurants.
“In creating type using the rediscovered Joschmi font, I aimed for simplicity, letting the forms do the talking and using a simple hierarchy to convey the information,” adds Palmer. “Colours were used to accentuate the playfulness of the geometric forms and the frame is there to hold the eye and bring a minimal decoration, without distracting from the beautiful letterforms.”
Designing a typeface is a surprisingly complex endeavour. “A design student or teacher will usually design just the letters that are necessary for a particular project, so the challenge for the students who worked on completing the unfinished fonts was to fill in the gaps to recreate the missing letters,” says Deuchler.
“We thought the students might complete a handful of letters or numbers, but they far exceeded what was asked of them – each student created a full typeface and alphabet, with beautifully accented letters and even alternate ones. We were blown away by the dedication these five students put into redesigning the fonts. The passion they brought to the project is really inspiring, and the results are incredible.”
The Lost Alphabets of Bauhaus Dessau is the latest iteration of Adobe’s Hidden Tresures series, which aims to revitalise lost creative history and use it to inspire the next generation of artists. Last year, Adobe worked with the Munch Museum in Oslo and Kyle T Webster, the world’s foremost authority on Photoshop brushes, to recreate the paintbrushes of Edvard Munch. They have since been downloaded by tens of thousands of people.
Deuchler says the project is a natural extension of the Munch brushes campaign, and will help introduce creatives to the iconic heritage of Bauhaus.
“The Munch brushes project was essentially about digital painting, which is illustration-driven, whereas a font can be applied in so many more ways, so the possibilities are truly endless in terms of how people will use the fonts we’ve unearthed from the Bauhaus,” says Deuchler.
“What’s fascinating about finding designs and sketches that design students were working on 100 years ago is how relevant they are to modern design.”
Deuchler says he has “very high expectations” of how Adobe’s community of users will apply the new typefaces to the world of design, architecture and fashion.
“We hope that bringing these forgotten typography treasures into the modern day will help to energise a new era of creativity,” he says.
“This campaign is all about recognising the creative impact font designs have in how we communicate and the role they play in arts and culture. Adobe doesn’t just make software for creatives – we’re interested in supporting creativity in a much broader sense.”
Ultimately, Hidden Treasures is about the continuation of stories that were started 100 years ago. “As a designer and design teacher, I’ve always taught that nobody can create something from nothing – the talent of a designer is based on the accumulation of their own experiences, because it’s the things you see, read and hear that inspire the creative person,” says Deuchler.
“The recovery of things from the past has always had a vital part to play in the creation of new things for the future and bringing pieces of the Bauhaus back to life in this way is an exciting moment for the designers of the future.”
Ready to design like a master? Enter Adobe’s Hidden Treasures contest using the Bauhaus Dessau fonts and you could win an all-expenses paid trip to Dessau, Germany, to visit the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Unesco world heritage site. Click here to find out more
