RAIN

Started off with an overview of last week. The Bauhaus was about the unity of craftsman and about ideas from all the different movements being explored and applied to functional design. Some of the teachers were Paul Klee, Moholy(?) Nagy, Johannes Itten, Herbert Bayer, Kandinsky,......and some others. Nagy eventually replaces Itten and becomes Gropius right hand man. Nagy did things like typophoto, photograms, and photo plastiq. Herbert Bayer was the one who designed the Universal typeface. It has no capitals and because of that it is difficult to read. He said it didn't make sense to have to alphabets. We watched Bauhaus in America, I thought the beginning was really interesting and I really tried to stay awake, but no sleep the night before kept me from seeing the second half. Evidently it talked about two different models of teaching. One has restraints and deadlines which usually assures success and the other is opened ended and does not assure success. Jan Tschichold did the hand lettered advertisment. He went to the first exhibition of Bauhaus in 1923 when he was only 20 years old. By 1923 only a year later he work had completely changed to look like the work of the Bauhaus and he was writing about the typographic style of the Bauhaus, in 1925 he wrote a book on elementary, and in 1928 published The New Typography. He used the golden ration and other grids in his designs. He was eventually arrested by the Nazi's for using un German typography. They found Soviet Posters in his possession and held him for six weeks. After that he returned to more traditional work and moved away. He did work for Penguin Books later in his life.


I really loved Lester Beale's posters for the Rural Electrification Administratioin