Bauhaus style

The vocabulary is deliberately tiny. Three primaries, red, yellow, and blue, plus black and white, printed on warm off-white paper. Three shapes, the circle, the triangle, and the square, used at poster scale and allowed to overlap. Wassily Kandinsky, who taught at the school, ran a questionnaire pairing each shape with a colour, triangle with yellow, square with red, circle with blue, and that pairing still turns up in work quoting the style ninety years later. Type is geometric sans with no ornament and no serif, set flush left against an asymmetric grid, frequently in all lowercase because Herbert Bayer argued that two alphabets for one sound was waste. Rules and bars organise the page, and a single diagonal supplies the movement that the right angles refuse.

The school itself ran from 1919 to 1933, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, moved to Dessau in 1925 and briefly to Berlin, and closed under Nazi pressure. Its project was to put art back into production: workshops taught by artists and craftsmen together, with the aim that a chair, a teapot, a building, and a poster could all be designed by the same principles. Its own slogan was art and technology, a new unity. The phrase most often attached to it now, form follows function, is the architect Louis Sullivan’s from 1896, adopted rather than coined in Dessau, and the school’s teachers argued about it constantly. When the staff scattered in 1933 they took the method to Chicago, to Ulm, and eventually to almost every design curriculum that followed.

Its descendant on this site is Swiss style, and the two are easy to blur. Swiss design inherited the grid, the sans serif, the asymmetry, and the refusal of ornament, then dropped the primaries and the shape play in favour of photography, a neutral grotesque, and the mathematics of the grid itself. So a page of red circles and yellow triangles is Bauhaus quoting; a page of Helvetica flush left on a twelve column grid with one photograph is Swiss. De Stijl is the other close relative, sharing the primaries but keeping to rectangles and horizontals, which is exactly why a diagonal reads as a Bauhaus move.

As an interface register it suits identity work, marketing pages, and anything that wants to look like a considered object: the shapes make excellent empty states, section markers, and category marks. Two cautions. Saturated primaries are already spoken for in an interface, where red is an error and blue is a link, so a poster palette applied to a form will say things you did not mean, and shape coding needs a text label beside it rather than colour alone. And geometric sans faces are drawn for display: at body sizes their closed apertures and single storey letterforms slow reading down, so borrow the grid and the discipline but set the paragraphs in something meant for paragraphs.