Design Omnipresent: Bauhaus is Omnipresent in Design

*Image credited below

Some words that come to mind when thinking about the Bauhaus institution are: universal, form, function, describing, and also Modernism, Kandinsky, Albers, and Moholy-Nagy (okay maybe not the last one, it’s a difficult name!). The work of these people and the ideas developed in this school revolutionized the world of Design. The use of rational methods and techniques it created a visual language that would be universally recognizable and understandable to all. It accomplished this by simplifying forms so that they could be broken down into geometric shapes, and by emphasizing the need for the coherence of form and functionality in design. However, even with this technical jargon, the ideas of Bauhaus remained rooted in humanity and humans, for design is about people after all! With simplicity and people in mind, the Bauhaus institution developed design as we know it today (Graphic Design: The New Basics).

These ideas that developed during the 1920s and 1930s in post WWI Germany are still relevant and taught today in art and design classes and schools. Staaliches Bauhaus or “House of Building” was a crafts and fine arts school in Germany founded by Walter Gropius, an architect, which influenced the later development of art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography (Wikipedia: Bauhaus). Or one could just say Design itself!

What makes this institution so relevant today?

The answer lies in graphic design, or more specifically the software associated with graphic design. According to Ellen Lupton in her book Graphic Design: The New Basics she states, “What makes them new again is their omnipresent accessibility through software” (Back to Bauhaus-Graphic Design: The New Basics). The “them” Lupton talks here about is the basic design elements such as point, line, plane, color, scale etc. that came out of the rational simplified ideas of the Bauhaus. And the reason these are so widely used in design is due to the fact that software designers that built programs such as Photoshop and InDesign did so with the Bauhaus goal of “describing (but not interpreting) the language of vision” (Lupton 9). Thus, through design software the Bauhaus concepts and ideas were revitalized and became tools with which designers could create coherent universal digital images for a large and varied audience.

Baushaus is omnipresent in design because it created a universal visual language that could be used by designers and understood by everyone at a scale that was massive.

Credits:

Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. I got most of my information from the Chapter titled “Back to Bauhaus” written by Ellen Lupton.

http://www.gdbasics.com/

Wikipedia: Bauhaus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus