Communication Blog

Initial Meeting – 22nd October 2021

After meeting with my group in our lesson we we’re all set on choosing the Bauhaus design movement as our project topic, during our discussion about our project we came up with a few ideas and questions to bas your research off of like influential designers throughout that period and what the main principles and characteristics of the Bauhaus movement were. We also want to look into the Bauhaus school to see why it was so influential throughout that design era.

We started to discuss certain job roles between us and get an idea on structure and time management, we decided that Peter, Eimear, Taylor and I would conduct research into the Bauhaus movement and then distill the content down, Taylor would look into creating some designs for our presentation orientated around the Bauhaus design period and I would go through all the content and filter it down to fit within the guidelines of the project which is 10 minutes.

Initially I had tried contacting my group via email before our class on Friday but I felt like this was a slower method of communication as everyone may not have their university emails linked to their mobile device, I decided to use social media as a tool by adding my group on Facebook and creating a group chat were we are able to share ideas and information about the project as well as video call for meetings when they are planned.

I have included an image below of the mind map we had created for our design history presentation.

 

 

Initial Slide Design Ideas – 28th October 2021

Taylor messaged into the group chat mentioning she had created the initial design ideas for our presentation, personally I thought the designs were really good and they portrayed the influence of the bauhaus movement extremely well. My only suggestion with the designs were to use a bolder typefaces for the headings to improve the texts readability. Overall I felt like this was a great step towards seeing the overall project come together and I was able to visualise the final product in mind.

I have included the designs Taylor had created below to give you an idea on what direction we were trying to go with the project.

 

 

Presentation Content Refinement – 7th November 2021

As I was tasked with refining the research content we had gathered to fit into the 10 minute time slot we had for our presentation, I had asked the other people in my group to send me over the research they had collected about The Bauhaus School and The Bauhaus Design Movement by Sunday the 7th of November to allow me time go through the material and pick out key points of information that I thought would be most important and relevant to the topic we had chosen to present for our project.

Personally, I thought the research everyone had conducted was extremely detailed which made it a lot easier for me to distill the content down but still retaining the factual and important information about The Bauhaus School, The Bauhaus Manifesto, The Bauhaus Design Movement in addition to important figures from that time period.

I thought it would be best to cover the history of The Bauhaus School in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin as well as The Bauhaus Design Movement, The Bauhaus Manifesto and staff and students from The Bauhaus School like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer. There were more profiles I could have covered but it would have been harder to fit into the 10 minute time slot we were given for our presentation.

I have included a list of the content sub-categories below to give you an overview on what will be covered in our presentation.

• The Bauhaus Design Movement
• The Bauhaus Manifesto
• Walter Gropius
• Bauhaus in Weimar
• Bauhaus in Dessau
• Bauhaus in Berlin
• Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
• Josef Albers
• Herbert Bayer
• Bauhaus & The New Typography

 

Practicing Our Presentation – 8th November 2021

On the 8th of November 2021, we had all decided to run through our presentation to ensure that we could fit it into the time slot allocated to us. I had originally set the time of the call to start at 6:30pm on the 8th of November but only Peter and Eimear had attended the call. As Taylor didn’t attend the call we had to reschedule the call for another day, After discussion with my group we had decided to reschedule the call for Wednesday 10th November 2021 at 9:30am as this was the only time everyone would be free to go over the presentation for an hour.

I went over what I had done for the presentation and had allocated everyone a few slides each to cover when we are presenting the presentation to our class on the 12th of November. As the deadline was closing in and our presentation was just around the corner I thought it would be a better idea to start taking lead on the project and delegating tasks to each individual so we can actually get the presentation done in time.

I have included a list of what topics I had allocated to everyone in my group below to give you an idea on what each person will be talking about.

Peter

• Bauhaus in Weimar
• Bauhaus in Dessau
• Bauhaus in Berlin

Eimear

• The Bauhaus Design Movement
• The Bauhaus Manifesto

Taylor

• Walter Gropius
• Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
• Josef Albers

Benn

• Herbert Bayer
• Bauhaus & The New Typography

 

Practicing Our Presentation 2.0 – 10th November 2021

We had initially planned to run through our presentation on Wednesday 10th November 2021 at 9:30am as this was the only time Peter was available to call as he was working that day. Only myself and Peter attended the call which forced us to reschedule our run through of the presentation for a second time which was really frustrating as everyone in my group had confirmed they were free on this day. I had advised everyone to practice their sections and fit it into a two and a half minute time frame to allow us all to complete the presentation within the 10 minute time slot we were allocated for our project. Personally I will be running through my section of the presentation trying to fill the 2.5 minute time window I am given along with everyone else in my group and this will be my main focus up until the presentation on Friday 12th November 2021.

 

Presentation Hand-In Deadline – 11th November 2021

Our lecturer Kyle had asked us to nominate one person from our group to share the presentation with him by 5pm on the 11th of November 2021 so he was able to see what was going to be covered in our design history presentation. As Taylor had initially set up the google slides document we thought it would be a better options for her to share the presentation with Kyle to avoid any issues that may occur with another member sending this presentation through.

 

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Bauhaus Research

Introduction to The Bauhaus Design Movement

The Bauhaus design movement was first introduced in the early 1900’s and aimed to explore design as a universal language of vision that could be understood by everyone, the movement brought together ideas that were explored by the the Arts & Crafts and Deutscher Werkbund^[3] movement throughout the 19th century. The design movement had a huge influence on design and visual arts and laid the foundations for modern design that we see today in branding, advertising, printing and applications.^[2] The Bauhaus movement was primarily aimed towards functionality and every element serving a purpose, they sought to reject and remove any decorative or ornate characteristics that were commonly seen in previous design periods throughout the 19th century in addition to the use of straight lines, grid systems and basic geometric shapes as they aimed to create a new unity between visual arts and industrialisation.^[3]

 

The Bauhaus Design School

The Bauhaus Design School was designed and established by the German architect Walter Gropius in the German town of Weimar in 1919.^[1] Initially graphic design wasn’t included in the original curriculum at The Bauhaus design school upon its opening in 1919 and it mainly focused on the visual art in architecture until Laszlo Moholy-Nagy began to teach elements of graphic design like photography and typography.^[3] While there were females that attended The Bauhaus Design School in its short life span the school and design industry itself was primarily male dominated and Walter Gropius the founder of the Bauhaus Design School actively excluded women from design and media, this was mostly evident in architecture.^[1] The Bauhaus Design School was one of the most influential educational establishments in the development of the modern design movement in graphic design, visual arts and architecture throughout the early 1900’s.^[3]

The school had a numerous amount of influential figures as both staff and students of The Bauhaus including Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and former student of the Bauhaus Herbert Bayers. Bayers attended the Weimar campus from 1921 to 1923 where he was taught by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Vassily Kandinsky and went on to become the head of typography and advertisement at the school after graduation. In 1928, Herbert Bayer decided to leave The Bauhaus Design School to allow him to pursue his own career and open his own design studio.^[3]

In 1921 one of the most reputable names from the De Stijl movement, Theo Van Doesburg, settled in Weimar where he began to share his ideas and philosophies from the De Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements. A year later in 1922 Theo Van Doesburg went on to become a member of staff at The Bauhaus Design School where he offered alternative teachings students about the rational and geometric principles and philosophies around the De Stijl and Russia Constructivist movements.^[1] Theo van Doesburg went on to organise the Constructivist Congress in 1922 where he met El Lissitzky, who was an attendant to the congress at the time.^[1] The movement and the school allowed designers and artists to experiment and explore new ideas that were associated with the De Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements that were happening around the same period.^[3]

In Laszlo’s first publication of The Bauhaus Press in 1919 to 1923 he stated that “typography is a tool of communication. It must communicate in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity.” this outlook and approach to typography sparked the New Typography movement throughout the 20th century and the ideas and philosophies are still used today.^[3]

In 1925 The Bauhaus Design School moved from Weimar to Dessau after the Germany was under political and economic pressure, the relocation to Dessau allowed the movement to shift towards Constructivism and Functionalism.^[3] Throughout the Dessau Bauhaus period Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer began to give The Bauhaus its distinctive identity and what we now recognise The Bauhaus to be. The design period was possibly one of the most influential developments in the 20th century and paved the way for design as we know it today, the principles and ideas of the Bauhaus are still continued to this day.

After the Nazi’s took control of Dessau in Germany, The Bauhaus Design School was forced to withdraw all staff contracts in 1932 and the school relocated to Berlin where they set up shop in an empty telephone factory.^[3] After a year of settling in Berlin the Bauhaus Design School was forced to permanently close its doors after the Nazi’s took control on Germany, the Nazi’s rejected the ideas of The Bauhaus and wanted to remove the movement all together which made a lot of the staff and students migrate to other countries where they were able to share their ideas around the world, this allowed the movement to spread like wildfire.

The Bauhaus was possibly one of the most influential establishments throughout the 1900’s and changed the way we design for the modern world, their philosophies and ideas were focused on simplicity and modernism and they believed that design should be functional. With their use of basic forms, sans-serif typefaces and grid structures the movement led the way for the New Internation Typographic style.

 

The New Typography

The term ‘New Typography’ was initially coined by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1923 and was used to describe the modern movement that was seen in typography throughout the 1920’s and the 20th century.^[1] The research and experimentation of rational and geometric letterforms were one of the most recognisable qualities of The Bauhaus Design School.^[1] Sans-serif typefaces quickly became a huge success throughout the Bauhaus design movement and were one of the most widely adopted type classifications in history due to their basic form and their ability to be functional.^[4]

One advantage to sans-serif typefaces is their ability to have multiple different variations within the same typeface family, an example of this is in the typeface Univers which was sans-serif typeface based on a modular system that was created in 1957 by Adrian Frutiger, the typeface had a total of 21 different variants making up the Univers type family ranging from different widths, weights and obliques/italics.^[4]

Futura and Gill Sans were two popular sans-serif typefaces that were influenced by the principles and ideas of The Bauhaus design movement, these were later followed by sans-serif and Neo-grotesque typefaces throughout the 20th century like Helvetica and Optima in Europe and Franklin Gothic and Avant Garde in the United States.^[4] The sans-serif typeface Futura designed by Paul Renner at the peak of The Bauhaus design movement in 1927 shared a lot of the same ideas and principles as The Bauhaus School and many of its staff and students, although Paul Renner did not attend The Bauhaus Design School he shared many of the same ideas and philosophies as other influential names from the design movement.^[1]

Tschichold stated in his book Die Neue Typographie, that was published in Berlin in 1928, “The essence of the new typography is clarity. This puts it in direct opposition with the old typography, whose aim was ‘beauty’ and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today.”. This was a statement saying that functionality is more important than appearance, he strongly believed that typography should serve a purpose as a form of communication.^[1] The textbook published by Jan Tschichold aimed to explain and clarify the history, theories and practices of the New Typography design movement.^[1]

Jan Tschichold was a calligrapher, typographer and book designer from Leipzig in Germany, having worked with typography his whole life and growing up around typography and type setting due to his fathers profession Tschichold was heavily inspired by his visit to the Weimar Exhibition at the Bauhaus Design School where he quickly became influenced by the ideas and philosophies of the movement and went on to establish himself as a leading name of the New Typography movement throughout the 1900’s.^[1]

 

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Presentation Content Refinement

For our group project I was tasked with refining the research content we had gathered to allow it to fit into the 10 minute time slot we were allocated for our presentation, I had asked everyone to send me through their research so I could go through it all and decide what topics would be best to talk about in relation to The Bauhaus Design Movement and The Bauhaus School of Design. With the research myself and my group had conducted we had plenty of options on what to cover in our presentation so I decided to distill the content down into a timeline format covering the history of the Bauhaus Design School, influential designers who worked and studied at the school as well as covering their innovation of typography and how they used it to communicate.

To fit this into to the 10 minute time slot we were allocated for our group presentation I decided to aim for around 1200 words as this was around 10 minutes at an average reading speed, I thought this would be a good idea to get us into close proximity to the limitations we had been given for our presentation, the content along with some brief descriptions of designers work should land us close to the 10 minute mark.

I have included the presentation content below to give you a more in-depth idea on what will be covered in our presentation.

 

Bauhaus Design Movement

The Bauhaus design movement is possibly one of the most iconic design movements in history as it shaped the way we design for the future.

They aimed to create modern solutions to the problems that had been created from the Industrial Revolution.

The movement pursued similar ideas to that of the Arts & crafts movement and the Deutscher Werkbund movement throughout the 19th century.

The movement is mostly recognised for its rejection to decorative and ornate elements that were commonly used throughout previous design movements as they focused on design serving a purpose and functionality being more important than image and appearance.

The movement was primarily based on modernism and simplicity and aimed to make design accessible to everyone, they believed the use of basic shapes, primary colours, grid systems, straight lines and simplistic typography allowed design to be understood by everyone.

The Bauhaus design movement originated from The Bauhaus Design School where that practiced architecture and visual arts to solve problems created by the industrial revolution and aimed to change the way we visualise art and design.

Although The Bauhaus School of Design was short lived the movement had a huge impact on the world around us and changed the way we design for the modern world.

 

Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius was a German architect born in 1883 and was the original founder of The Bauhaus School and the design of the Bauhaus School building located in Weimar upon its opening in 1919.

Gropius studied architecture at the Technical School in Munich throughout his 20’s and worked on designing buildings, furniture, wallpapers, automobiles, diesel locomotives and objects for mass production.

Walter Gropius was an entrepreneur and visionary who aimed to make art a social concern after the First World War.

In 1919 he became master of the Grand Ducal Saxonian School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, which he renamed Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. This was the beginning of the famous Bauhaus school. 

 

Bauhaus Manifesto

In 1919 around the time of the opening of the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Walter Gropius published a manifesto for The Bauhaus School of Design.

The manifesto expressed the basic principles of the new school and its aim to bring architects and artists together to create a new unity placing emphasis on the importance of architecture, visual arts and craftsmanship.

On the cover of The Bauhaus Manifesto there is an illustration of a cathedral with 3 stars above it, this is meant to represent the 3 most important arts; painting, architecture and sculpture which are the focuses of The Bauhaus School of Design.

The Manifesto states that “The ultimate goal of all arts is the building.” which tells us that The Bauhaus School was heavily focused on architecture upon its initial opening in 1919.

The manifesto was published in multiple magazines across Germany after WWI to attract new and aspiring students to study at the newly founded school.

 

Weimar Bauhaus

The Bauhaus School of Design opened its doors in 1919 where it was situated in Weimar, Germany.

The school would founded by the German architect Walter Gropius who studied architecture throughout his career and sought to change the way we see design and visual arts within buildings.

The school allowed the exploration of new ideas that were associated with the De Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements that were apparent around the same period in history.

Initially graphic design was not featured on the curriculum upon the opening of The Bauhaus School of Design in Weimar and placed a heavy focus on architecture which was Walter Gropius’s main focus.

The school was primarily male dominated as Gropius believed that architecture and design was a job for men and he actively made this apparent throughout his time at the Bauhaus School from 1919 to 1928.

 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of the founding lecturers at the Bauhaus School in Weimar, teaching preliminary courses at the school alongside Josef Albers and other names like Johannes Itten, Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

Although graphic design and visual arts were not the main focus of The Bauhaus School of Design upon its opening in 1919, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy started to introduce photography and typography into the curriculum over the years which started to give The Bauhaus a distinctive identity in their design.

In Laszlo’s first publication of The Bauhaus Press in 1919 to 1923 he stated that “typography is a tool of communication. It must communicate in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity.” this outlook and approach to typography sparked the New Typography movement throughout the 20th century and the ideas and philosophies are still used today.

 

Josef Alber

Born in  1888, Josef Albers was a German born artists who is famously known for his iconic square paintings.

Initially, Josef Albers joined The Bauhaus School of Design in 1922 where he began working with stained glass.

After the relocation of The Bauhaus in 1925, Albers went on to become a part of the faculty at The Bauhaus School in Dessau where he explored colour theory and abstract painting through the use of rectangular patterns and the basic primary colours, blue, red and yellow along with generic white and blacks colours.

 

Dessau & Berlin Bauhaus

In 1925, the Bauhaus School of design closed its doors in the Weimar building and relocated to Dessau, Germany after political and economics pressure.

The move to Dessau created a shift towards the Constructivism and Functionalism which were two focuses of similar movement around that time.

In 1932, the school was forced to withdraw its staff contracts after the Nazi’s dominated the city of Dessau in Germany which forced the school to relocate for a second time since their opening.

After the closure of The Bauhaus School in Dessau after political and economic stress the school relocated to Berlin in 1932 where it resided in an old, empty telephone factory.

The school was the terminated a year later in 1933 after the Nazi’s gained controlled of Berlin, Hitler and the Nazi’s didn’t agree with the philosophies and ideas of The Bauhaus School and sought to remove the movement all together.

After the closure, lecturers and students from The Bauhaus School of Design were forced to move to other countries around the world which allowed them to share there ideas and spread the movement globally to allow it influence design across the world.

 

Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer was initially a student at The Bauhaus School of Design in Weimar where he was taught by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers from 1921 to 1923.

Bayer went on to become a part of the faculty staff at The Bauhaus School in Dessau where we became the head of the new typography and advertising department.

Bayer used The Bauhaus publications over the years as a vehicle for his radical typographic ideas and worked alongside Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to create a distinctive visual identity for The Bauhaus School and the philosophies it believed in.

Herbert Bayer ended up leaving the Bauhaus School in 1928 alongside Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

 

Bauhaus & The New Typography

The Bauhaus School and the Bauhaus design movement placed a lot of emphasis on functionality within design and the movement is often recognised by the use of modern sans-serif faces that were not popularly used throughout the early 1900’s.

This emphasis on rationality, grid structure, sans-serif typefaces and links to contemporary design movements led the way for the New International Typographic Style, this is commonly known as Swiss-Design.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote in the first publication of The Bauhaus Press from 1919-1923 and stated that “Typography is a tool of communication. It must communicate in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity.

This focus on clarity was a huge change for design as it was initially extremely decorative and ornate with the main focus being on beauty as opposed to functionality and clarity. This changed the way products were designed for the modern world and the principles and ideas are still used in design today.

 

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References & Sources

1. J., S., 2019. Graphic Design: A New History. Yale University Press.
2. Lupton, E. and Cole, J., 2015. Graphic Design: The New Basics. Princeton Architectural Press.
3. Livingston, A. and Livingston, I., 2012. The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers. Thames & Hudson.
4. Dabner, D., Stewart, S., Zempol, E. and Vickress, A., 2017. Graphic Design School. Thames & Hudson.