Creating your own typo

Five fonts based on designs by well-known Bauhaus figures have been resurrected by German typographer Erik Spiekermann and a group of his students. After the school’s abrupt termination in 1933, the typeface designs were “lost to history.” With the school’s centennial approaching next year, Spiekermann thought it was finally time to share them with the world. So, in collaboration with Adobe and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, he solicited the help of five typographic design students from around the world to finish the designs that had been left unfinished.

As a starting point for the fonts, Spiekermann and the students used hand-drawn letter pieces, typographic sketches, and posters from the Bauhaus archive. They then imported these into Adobe Illustrator, a graphic design application, and began to fill in the blanks. Adobe has already made two of the fonts, designed by Joost Schmidt and Xanti Schawinsky, accessible for free. The other three fonts, designed by Carl Marx, Reinhold Rossig, and Alfred Arnolt, will be released in the coming months.

The project required all five students to go to Dessau, Germany, to visit the Bauhaus school building. They were given “historical type exercises” established by Bauhaus masters in addition to working with digital tools. “Drawing on graph paper with a circle and set square is a different tool than designing on a computer. But that is precisely the point “Spiekermann stated. The goal was to instill in them the same mindset as Bauhaus students, which was to disregard “emotional” creativity in favor of a more mechanical method. The resurrected fonts, according to Spiekermann, will “inspire a new generation of designers.”

Hitti, N. (2022). Erik Spiekermann creates digital fonts from unfinished Bauhaus designs. Retrieved 3 February 2022, from https://www.dezeen.com/2018/06/14/erik-spiekermann-adobe-bauhaus-fonts-graphic-design/