A Treasure Trove of Typefaces

Just imagine – you’re one of the world’s first graphic designers and it’s your job to create a whole new typography. You want to design layouts and fonts like the world has never seen.

You want to present them in the summer of 1923 at the first big exhibition at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where you also happen to be students.

“Typography must be a clear communication in the most vivid form,” he says, and you jot that down in your notebooks.

Fortunately you don’t need to start from scratch. The Russian Constructivists and the Dutch with their De Stijl movement have laid the groundwork and already simplified colours and forms.

You show what you’ve got at the big Bauhaus summer exhibition. You design and print catalogues, brochures and posters – and all in this new “Bauhaus typography”, as people in the industry will soon be reverently calling it.

Your printed materials attract a lot of attention and you get a lot of orders from firms, publishers and private customers.

But you still have time for your own publications as well, a field where you are able to experiment, like the Bauhaus books (between 1925 and 1929 14 volumes are published) and the Bauhaus magazine (starting from 1926 14 issues appear, circulation: 3000 pieces).

You prefer to do advertising for your own products, like Bauhaus wallpaper and the Kandem lamps, for instance.

The typeface you predominantly work with is Grotesque sans-serif. It’s not really new; it was developed in the last century.

You’ve been wanting your own fonts for a long time. The individual letters should derive from geometric forms like triangles, circles and squares – because that’s how you do things at the Bauhaus.

From 1925 on, Joost Schmidt – your former fellow student, whom you just call Schmidtchen – teaches typography in the foundation course that every new Bauhaus student has to complete.

But you aren’t the only ones who are working on new fonts. Paul Renner publishes his Futura in Frankfurt in 1927. His letters, derived from the basic geometric forms, are also well readable in continuous text – and so hit the nerve of designers with a modern attitude, including yours. Soon you’re using the new typeface for your printed material.

But you still carry on working on your own fonts on the side.

When Herbert Bayer leaves the Bauhaus in 1928, Schmidtchen takes over the print and promotion workshop. One of you is called Carl Marx and he will later remember Schmidtchen’s typography like this:

Young people like you sometimes think you have all the time in the world. But that’s not the case. In 1932 the Bauhaus has to move again, this time to Berlin, where Schmidtchen does not get a contract in the new school. And so many of your beautiful typefaces, never completed and existing only as fragments, get put in the drawer and are soon forgotten.

But they are rediscovered nearly a hundred years later.

The Font REROSS is based on designs by Reinhold Rossig.

The Font CARL MARX is based on designs by Carl Marx.

The Font JOSCHMI is based on designs by Joost Schmidt.

The Font XANTI is based on designs by Xanti Schawinsky.

The Font ALFARN is based on designs by Alfred Arndt.