There are few art schools that have had such an important and lasting impact on the world of design, art and architecture as Germany’s Bauhaus.
Now, more than 80 years after it was closed by the Nazis, a series of lost typefaces have been rediscovered and brought back to life by digital software company Adobe, which has made them widely available for everyone to use.
The significance of the find and the influence of the Bauhaus movement, which sought to reimagine everyday objects against a backdrop of huge historic change and upheaval, are hard to underestimate.
When the school opened in 1919, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had just crumbled to the east of Germany following the first world war. The old-world order was under threat across the rest of Europe throughout the next decade.
In Germany, considerable hardship followed the Versailles treaty. It was a time to challenge the rigid class-based system that was believed to have let the country down and, since 1920, universal suffrage meant ordinary men and women had the power to campaign, and vote, for change.
Artists felt it was their responsibility to tap into the zeitgeist by challenging the appearance of everyday objects and reimagining them to reflect an emerging new society, which was freeing itself of the shackles and embellishments of the past. The Bauhaus school personified that movement right up until its closure in 1933.
Bauhaus was launched in Weimar, before moving to Dessau and later Berlin. It combined crafts and fine arts and, although the name means “building house” in English, it did not initially have an architecture department.
However, the school is widely acknowledged as the founding father of modernist architecture. Its popularisation of flat roofs particularly rankled the Nazis who felt a traditional German house should have a pitched roof.
One of the school’s projects tasked students with creating new typefaces, free from what were considered to be the bourgeois embellishments of hooks and curls found in a traditional serif fonts.
The resulting sketches were never formally turned into typefaces because they were not finished and the students did not have access to the tools required to cast them in metal.
The realisation that these unfinished gems were hidden away, prompted renowned typography expert Erik Spiekermann to collaborate with Adobe to bring them back to life. To do so, students were tasked with finishing off the designs, before they were released to modern-day designers.
“The fonts are so important because they reflect this incredibly important historical period, where designers felt everything needed to be rethought and rebuilt,” Spiekermann says.
“The Bauhaus students were asked to reimagine typography without the roman overload, without all the unnecessary decoration. The sketches were done so beautifully. They were at different levels of readiness. None had all the letters, numbers and symbols finished, so it has been amazing to see new life breathed into them so they could be made into fonts people can use today.”
The prospect of channelling something “new” from the Bauhaus era into fresh tools that could stir the creative juices of Adobe’s modern users was a labour of love for Simon Morris, the company’s senior director of campaign marketing.
Just last year, Adobe launched its Hidden Treasures of Creativity programme, through which designers could download digitised versions of the paintbrushes Edvard Munch used to create The Scream series and other masterpieces. Recreating unfinished typefaces from the Bauhaus school was deemed a fitting sequel.
“We’re dedicated to inspiring creativity in our users, so we can’t wait to see what they bring to life with these new fonts, which represent such an iconic movement in design,” he says.
“The fonts are a beautiful part of design heritage, they’re so distinctive they immediately remind you of the movement. We believe that creativity is timeless, so putting these fonts in the hands of modern-day designers is a great way for us to get back to our creative roots and help our users tell their story through new tools that are helping history come back to life.”
Morris is hoping the typefaces will be as well received among creatives as the company’s Edvard Munch project. The priceless paintbrushes were digitised and downloaded more than 40,000 times by modern-day designers, 400 of whom entered a competition to create a fifth version of The Scream painting. The top pictures were exhibited in Oslo.
Similarly, Adobe users are now being challenged to work with the five new Bauhaus typefaces to come up with new designs in a competition that will showcase the power of what lay unfinished in sketchbooks for more than 80 years. Conversations are already under way to establish if the final works can be displayed at the Bauhaus Archive Museum of Design in Berlin.
According to Spiekermann, the “no-frills” typefaces are perfectly suited to a brand or a campaigner’s needs. “These fonts came from turbulent times and they’d be great for anything where you want to get over something very simple and clear, like advertising and propaganda,” he says.
“They’re mechanical in appearance, so not so well suited for a longer read, like a book or a magazine. They’re too sharp and stark, so I expect to see them used to make very clear statements in posters, particularly political messaging.”
As a result, a movement that rethought the appearance of everyday objects could finally be applied to changing what we think, as well as what we see.
To participate in Challenge three – Business Card (30 July to 19 August) – using the historic typefaces, visit Adobe Hidden Treasures
