1929
Joost Schmidt (designer) Ernst Kállai (editor)

bauhaus: magazine for design (bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung), vol. 3, no. 1

Letterpress 210 × 296 mm Dessau

296 210

In 1929, the design of bauhaus fell to Joost Schmidt, a former student and a junior master of lettering, after Swiss architect Hannes Meyer became director and László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer—up to that point the main typographic figures—left the school. When Schmidt took over bauhaus, he continued in the general direction set by Bayer. His most distinctive flourish was the new hand-lettered bauhaus logotype, set as white text in a black rectangle, for the magazine’s third volume. Drawing from one of his own alphabets, he moved the identity of the magazine toward the idealized geometric letterforms that many modernists aspired to, as opposed to the generic sans serif typefaces available at the time. Issue three of the third volume also records Schmidt’s interdisciplinary pedagogy as the new typography teacher. It covers the informational exhibition Gas and Water (Gas und Wasser), which was collaboratively carried out, under Schmidt’s direction, by the workshops for print and advertising, sculpture, carpentry, and metal. With this project, the Bauhaus realized its ambitions for typography: to have it be used, in partnership with other disciplines, for the communication of information to the public.



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