Spiekermann, along with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, supervised a team of design students and typography professionals who turned work by these designers into five font sets. Among the archives, designs by Joost Schmidt, Alfred Arndt, Carl Marx, Xanti Schawinsk, and Reinhold Rossig were incomplete, some of them existing simply as rough sketches.
Plenty of work was left unfinished when Bauhaus Dessau was closed abruptly in 1932 by the National Socialist Party. (You may remember the first iteration of Adobe’s Hidden Treasures project: digital versions of Edvard Munch’s brushstrokes.) The first two Bauhas-derived typefaces, Xants and Joschmi, are now available to download through Adobe Typekit. Last week, Adobe announced the launch of “ The Hidden Treasures - Bauhaus Dessau,” a campaign led by typeface designer Erik Spiekermann to turn fragments and sketches from the Bauhaus archives into functional fonts for Adobe Typekit. If you start feeling like you’re seeing Bauhaus-style typefaces everywhere, don’t worry, you’re not hallucinating a Modernist design resurgence. An example of Bauhaus type and poster design (all images courtesy of Adobe and Bauhaus Dessau)
