Saturday 7 December 2013

Bauhaus - Grid Systems

Bauhaus

Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term Bauhaus, literally “house of construction”, stood for ‘school of building”. The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of the fact he was an architect, the Bauhaus school didn’t have architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

There is also a Bauhaus typeface. The Bauhaus typeface design is based on Herbert Bayer's 1925 experimental ‘Universal’ typeface. Bayer studied for four years at the Bauhaus. In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Herbert Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. From 1925 to 1930 Bayer designed a geometric sans-serif proposal for a Universal Typeface that existed only as a design and was never actually cast into real type. These designs are now issued in digital form as Bayer Universal. The design also inspired ITC Bauhaus and Architype Bayer, which bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters. ITC Bauhaus was designed by Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso in 1975. Inheriting the simple geometric shapes and monotone stroke weights of Herbert Bayer's universal, it includes separate upper and lower case characters. 5 weights of roman fonts were made for this family. Another variant of Bayer’s Universal Alphabet is Blippo, resembling ITC Bauhaus in design, ITC Ronda in proportion and fit, prepared by FotoStar in the mid 1970s.

Grid Systems

In graphic design, a grid is a structure (usually two-dimensional) made up of a series of intersecting straight (vertical, horizontal, and angular) or curved guide lines used to structure content. The grid serves as an armature on which a designer can organize graphic elements (images,glyphsparagraphs) in a rational, easy to absorb manner. A grid can be use to organize graphic elements in relation to a page, in relation to other graphic elements on the page, or relation to other parts of the same graphic element or shape.

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