Aesthetics 2, fall '19
To celebrate Bauhaus 100, create something that embodies Bauhaus.
This was a very open ended project, so a large portion of the work in the beginning was to decide what I wanted to make. Some of my early ideas included a simple stool (such as the ulm stool, or drawing inspiration from Marcel Breuer's chairs), a side table, or a font. It should be fairly obvious what I decided to do.
I don't have any experience with making fonts before or after this project, but I had seen the documentary Helvetica, and spent more than a few dozen hours on Adobe Fonts. I was fairly certain that this was something I would enjoy doing.
My first couple of pages of sketches tried to draw inspiration from the intensely geometric posters that came out of the Bauhaus Weimar and Dessau. I started with some alphabets and individual letters, but after reading a little theory about font design I decided to focus on the letters H, O and P. These letters give enough information about x-height, total size, radii, and weight to extrapolate most of the rest of the alphabet.
This was the first alphabet I really fell in love with. I decided to put it on the back burner for a bit. My personal philosophy is to get rid of my first couple "good" ideas, so that I don't move forward with an idea that doesn't have much potential.
After drawing up another alphabet and a half, I went back to the previous one and tried fattening it up a bit. The heavier strokes worked well when the size of each glyph was small, but when I scaled it up it was extremely massive. At this point I had decided that the "font" would actually be an uppercase alphabet (similar to a titling font without punctuation and numbers).
Above you can see my last hand-drawn iteration before moving onto drawing the glyphs digitally. A lot of my time was spent trying to keep a consistent x-height. When drawing by hand, the sketchy pencil lines made the glyphs look messier next to each other than on a screen, and so trying to keep the glyphs balanced and consistent seemed a good way to counteract this issue. In the end, when drawing them digitally I moved away from this, as the overall geometry and design of the glyphs was enough to keep them looking cohesive.
Finally I worked on some iterations for the more irregular / complex glyphs. I also finetuned the letters on PC (overshooting the curves, adjusting weight), and finally put everything in the same document.
In hindsight, I wish I had done more research on fonts that came out of or were inspired by the Bauhaus. The font has some of it's own quirks, but is quite similar to fonts such as Alfarn and Reross Quadratic.
That being said, this is one of the most satisfying projects I have completed, and would jump at the opportunity to do something similar again.