The Bauhaus, the most influential design school of all time, turns 100 in 2019, but celebrations have already begun with Adobe’s release of a package of typefaces developed at the legendary school. In Brazil, Tipografia Paulistana and Grafias de Junho, by Priscila Farias and Roberto Andrés, show that the field of graphic memory is becoming established and doing very well, thank you!
The Bauhaus, the most influential design school of all time, turns 100 in 2019, but celebrations have already begun. One example is Adobe’s release of a package of typefaces developed at the legendary school.
The first outcome of a project led by type designer Erik Spiekermann with a group of students is the release, free for online use, of two type families: Joschmi and Xants.
Joschmi is a type family based on an unfinished project by designer Joost Schmidt, who created the poster for the first Bauhaus exhibition, held in Weimar in 1923 (pictured above). Schmidt taught calligraphy at the Bauhaus, and it is no exaggeration to say that he was responsible for what we now identify as the Bauhaus graphic style: that unmistakable geometric, condensed touch that is impossible to dissociate from the school.
Xants, meanwhile, is based on a creation by one of the most multimedia-oriented artists to pass through the Bauhaus, Xanti Schawinsky. His extensive work spans painting, drawing, experimental photography, stage design, jazz, exhibition design and expanded theater. As examples of his graphic design, we need only mention the original typography for Cinzano, Illy coffee and Olivetti. These graphic treasures were created in Italy, where Schawinsky, who was Jewish, worked after fleeing Nazi Germany when the school closed in 1933, also on the orders of the Nazi regime, which considered its style “un-German.”
(The scale of the damage Nazism inflicted on humanity is truly incalculable, which makes Adobe’s typographic recovery project all the more important.)
In Brazil
In Brazil, judging from two projects recently made available online, I can say that research in this area is beginning to consolidate and is doing very well, thank you!
I am referring to Tipografia Paulistana, a project coordinated by FAUUSP design professor Priscila Farias. With a team that includes fellow FAU professors Daniela Kutschat Hanns and Leandro Velloso, she has created a remarkable digital collection, making available images of type used in São Paulo’s print shops between 1827 and 1927, information about suppliers, printers’ and suppliers’ addresses, and details about people who worked in those businesses. It is sensational.
The other project is Grafias de Junho, by architect Roberto Andrés, an ongoing research project open to collaboration. Part of Roberto’s doctoral research at FAU under Professor Guilherme Wisnik, it seeks to reconstruct the memory of the June 2013 demonstrations through messages taken to the streets on posters, banners, flags, graffiti and other forms of writing. You can contribute images and support the website’s development through the crowdfunding platform Catarse. The material can be browsed by city, subject (the World Cup, mobility and health, for example), type of material (banner, poster, graffiti), and date.
To round things off, we should not forget that the 8th Latin American Typography Biennialis underway, with exhibitions and activities in several cities, including São Paulo, at the Museu da Casa Brasileira.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
Access the playlist with all the audio recordings of the Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP | Read all transcripts and posts.