Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau

Adobe project on Bauhaus typography

With its series Hidden Treasures of Creativity, the software company Adobe updates historic art and design themes into the digital context of the 21st century. For Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau, international masters’ students of typography have converted typeface sketches by the Bauhauslers into the digital world of system fonts. An experiment very much in the spirit of the Bauhaus. The project and the work of the masters’ students were both guided by Erik Spiekermann, Ferdinand Ulrich of p98a.berlin and Torsten Blume of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.  

More information is available on the website Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau..

Typography at the Bauhaus

It stands to reason that designers who aimed to modernize everyday life also explored text and type. It is therefore all the more surprising that, at the Bauhaus, typeface design was long viewed as just a secondary task. Self-designed manifestos, flyers, posters, advertising brochures and the magazine bauhaus emerged from the printing and advertising workshop headed by Herbert Beyer, but it was Joost Schmidt who only in Dessau developed a systematic course in graphic design. But just as the Bauhaus had made the figuration of learning itself its mission, the typography course took shape only gradually and remained in many respects creatively experimental, as is shown by the five artistic typeface designs of the Bauhaus teachers and students Joost Schmidt, Carl Marx, Alfred Arndt, Reinhold Rossig and Xanti Schawinsky.