poster 'universal alphabet'
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"Attempt at a New Typeface" is the title of Herbert Bayer's 1926 text in the Bauhaus issue of Offset magazine. The article is illustrated on page 399 with his design for a new "alphabet."
"Just as modern machines, architecture, and cinema are expressions of our modern age, so too must writing be," Bayer demands. Rigorous lowercase, simplicity, unity of construction, composition in the primary forms of square and circle—these are his demands. These principles characterize many Bauhaus designs around 1926.
On the published sheet, two characters, the g and the k, are described as still unfinished. Bayer thus makes design visible as a process.
Herbert Bayer's design is an idealization of simple construction and universal application. However, legibility was neglected; the typeface is more suitable for logos and individual words, but not for longer texts.
The universal typeface was used by Herbert Bayer in the 1960s for the logo he designed for the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, which the Bauhaus shop adopted at the same time. The "a" and "r" are simplified again, but the characters h, u, and s are taken from the then-popular Helvetica typeface. For a more harmonious form and better legibility of the lettering, the inner corners of the a and v are indented.
