Five fonts designed by the Bauhaus school are being recreated for digital use by Adobe.
With the Bauhaus’s guiding principle, “form follows function,” the design studio-turned-avant-garde college attracted artists, architects, and mathematicians alike. So it’s no wonder that the group invented functional yet bold typefaces, and soon, all Adobe Creative Cloud members will have access to five Bauhaus fonts.
With a team of students led by type designer Erik Spiekermann, Adobe is piecing together spare letters from the Bauhaus archives to recreate each of the five alphabets. The company has already released two fonts: one called “Xants” inspired by set design professor, Xanti Schawinsky, and another called “Joschmi,” which draws from Joost Schmidt, the designer behind the celebrated poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar.
Schawinsky’s type features dramatic, curvy lines punctuated with bold circles, while Schmidt’s invokes the style of chunky block letters. The latter type face was entirely recreated from a mere six lowercase letters by graphic designer Flavia Zimbardi. Next up in the series are fonts by Bauhaus members Carl Marx, Alfred Arndt, and Reingold Rossig.