Bauhaus
ITC Bauhaus
Year: 1975
Designers: Ed Benguiat, Victor Caruso
Foundry: International Typeface Corporation
As a student, and then an instructor at the influential Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer helped foster the typographic principles of the Bauhaus that eschewed ornament and decoration in favor of simplicity and functionality. To that end, in 1925 Bayer proposed a new single-case “universal” alphabet based on basic geometric shapes.
In the 60s and 70s several typefaces inspired by Bayer’s work were created, including Ronda, Blippo, Pump, Horatio and a few others. But in 1975, Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso created the multiweight ITC Bauhaus for the International Typeface Corporation.
Bayer would likely be horrified by the inclusion of both upper- and lower-case letterforms in these reimagined versions of his type experiment. “but why do we write and print with two alphabets?” Bayer wrote. “a large and a small sign are not necessary. we do not speak a capital A and a small a. we need a one-letter type alphabet.”
The graphic created here is an homage to another Bauhaus designer, Joost Schmidt, who created the famous poster promoting the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition.