Each new generation of designers goes back to the Bauhaus. Perhaps entering at different points and leaving with different things, but go back they do. Since 1960, the physical, archival trace of the Bauhaus schools has been kept at Berlin's Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, founded by Hans Maria Wingler. Rather remarkably, the archive hasn't developed a single corporate identity and has perhaps neglected the business of brand-building, under-exploited the archive's potential as a place of pilgrimage. Until now.
Waking up to its appeal, the archive is opening a new building to cope with increased visitor numbers in 2019. In the meantime Sascha Lobe, creative director of Stuttgart-based design studio L2M3, has developed a new identity for the archive, to be used on everything from posters and postcards to the archive's website and signage at the existing site and the new building.
Lobe has worked with blue-chip brands, including Vitra, Adidas and Mercedes-Benz, with a number of Germany's leading museums and with architects Daniel Libeskind, David Chipperfield and UNStudio's Ben Van Berkel.
Still, being charged with creating a screen-to-signage ready identity for the school that counted László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, not to mention Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, on its teaching staff is no small task; especially when so many other graphic designers and typographers have investigated that legacy. We'll let you decide whether Lobe has stood triumphantly on the shoulders of giants or got buried in the baggage.
The polymorphic typeface, named Bayer Next, takes obvious cues from the experimental 1925 Universal typeface - a geometrical, sans serif design by Bauhaus director of printing and advertising, Herbert Bayer - while giving the graphic forms of the Bauhaus a contemporary feel. The lack of capital letters in the logo reflects one of Bayer's typographic doctrines
Different variants of the typeface play with Bauhaus shapes and create endless possibilities
Both the branding concept and 555 glyphs have the potential to work on cards, posters, 3D signage and fashion merchandise. The lettering ranges from tightly kerned to widely spaced on posters
Here, the type and poster design echoes the systematic designs of the Bauhaus
On these posters, the type is more compressed. L2M3's open typographic system allows for infinite variation, while still having a clear visual coherence
The typeface recalls the curved forms of the Bauhaus Archive Museum, designed by Walter Gropius and opened in 1979
Fully justified text is used across the printed material for consistency
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