Herbert Bayers Modernist Font Univers
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One of the main contributing factors was the time period in which Herbert Bayer designed Univers. Hertbert Bayer was a teacher of typography at the famous German school Bauhaus from 1925 to 1928 and it was during this time he was asked by the head of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, to create a universal type face that could be utilized for the school . In 1925, Gropius commissioned Bayer to design a typeface for all Bauhaus communiqus and Bayer excitedly undertook this task." Design had changed after the World War that had just ended in which Germany was defeated. It sort for unity through visual communication rather than individualism. "Considerations of style and self-expression were subordinated to the "purity" of geometry and the demands of function. This method culminated in Bayer's attempt to design a typeface with letterforms so "essential" they would be understood as universal." This idea of design serving as wide a public as possible was in fact modernist in itself and its impact on univers was the abolishment of the uppercase which Bayer saw as unnecessary. Not all countries recognized uppercase as well as lowercase and Herbert Bayer argued that if our verbal language did not recognize upper case then why should our written. "Why should we write and print in two alphabets?..