Herbert Bayer

Bayer was both a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus and worked in a wide range of fields including painting, sculpture, typography, advertising and architecture. In his early years as a student he studied painting with Kandinsky, but in just a short while he was teaching one of the Bauhaus' first classes on typography. The amount of work that he created before he was 28 was more notable than most designers entire careers of work. He spent time teaching at the Bauhaus, working as an Art Director for the Container Corporation and as an architect in both Germany and America.

Bayer designed the type used in the signage at the Bauhaus building in Dessau.

In between his time at the Bauhaus and his career in America he spent time as the Art Director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office. His contributions to the fields of graphic design, typography and advertising were many. One that should be noted was his design for a typeface that consisted of entirely lowercase letters. The German blackletter types were overly ornate for his taste and their use of capital letter for every proper noun was annoying. Logically, Bayer developed a sans-serif alphabet of lowercase letters titled "Universal".

In 1946 Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado where he spent much of his time designing local architecture and posters for the local community. In 1959 he designed another sans-serif typeface. Again it was all in lower case, but he called it "fonetik alfabet" and it contained special characters for the endings -ed, -ion, -ory and -ing. He is one of the most recognized designers to come from the Bauhaus institution and his theories of design are still taught in many schools today.

Similar to many designs from the Bauhaus, Bayer designed a newspaper stand (above) to be made out of pre-fabricated materials so that it could easily be reproduced.