The living legacy of Bauhaus in digital design.

This year - in case anyone has not noticed - it’s the 100-year celebration of the Bauhaus School. There are hundreds of books covering the history of Bauhaus. I find it more relevant to focus on the living legacy of the school. Bauhaus might be regarded as a movement of the past, but I’d argue we are more affected by the Bauhaus movements in our time than at the time of Bauhaus itself.

There are two types of legacies from Bauhaus, the philosophical and the aesthetic. The philosophy is highly connected with modernism in general. Bauhaus artists believed that form and function should be in harmony, corresponding with each other, without any need for excessive decoration. This is a legacy I see in interaction design of any UX/UI - where the aesthetic is based on function and leaves no room for ornamentation which does not give purpose. In a way it's an empirical and cold approach to design where you want to guide users in a designed maze; those who create an app usually want something out of their users, and therefore the design is stripped from anything but the essential to direct users into a desired action. Much like the grand ideas of modern city planning or the way residential apartment living was planned according to functionalism; every part of a home was designed with the support of data of how people lived and what the primary need in general was.

Moreover; the iterative design process has been highly spoken of in the last decade as a new type of design thinking, but it's not - it was practised in the Bauhaus school as a way of learning and understanding the impact of design in our life. I believe this is one of the main reasons we’ve seen so many different disciplines practices at the school, resulting in several design icons - of which many are still in production.

Secondly, there is the aesthetic legacy of Bauhaus - which we see picked up as a trend every now and then. The most significant modern Bauhaus flirt come from tech giant Google who chose the colours from the Bauhaus palette for their logo. Red, blue, yellow and green.

In their logo update in 2015 (to the right), they altered the tone of the colours, but compensated by changing the font which left out the serifs - remember? - No need for excessive decoration which does not give purpose.

Google went even as far as adopting the iconic geometric Bauhaus shapes for the UI of the Google Home App. See the video below and reflect on the similarities with the following picture of a wooden construction set Bauspeil designed in 1923 by Georg Muche for the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition in 1923.

Bauspeil

If you are not convinced about the link between Google Home and Bauspeil, see this animation of Bauspeil created for a Kids Design Festival in Poland.

Below you can see a film of yet another example of how Bauhaus is made relevant to this day. It's from Adobe presenting their collection "Hidden Treasures Dessau Bauhaus", where legendary Erik Spiekermann speaks about how they revived archival typeface sketches into working fonts.

During the year of 2019, we will probably see a lot of celebration of the Bauhaus movement, and I encourage to reflect on how the design from Bauhaus links to designs of today. Let's not regard the Bauhaus movement as a chapter in history, but rather the springboard of modern design - just as The Beatles did for contemporary music.

If you want to learn more about Bauhaus, I recommend the Taschen book: Bauhaus.

I also recommend the documentary series on YouTube: Architecture, art and design - 100 years of the Bauhaus. The documentary shows a broad perspective of the school and its legacy.

Design is an art form

I've spent some time reflecting on my work as a visual designer and the traces I leave behind in my work. In many ways, I share the common ground of artists. The similarities are that we both create a message which is meant to evoke something within the viewer, while the difference is that it's not personal, never the less, it's my interpretation of the client's message.

The old (or antique even) title for what I do is Commercial Artist, while the modern one is Visual Designer, or just: Visual. A Commercial Artist of the time would be a trained artist that needed to supplement their artistic incomes with commissioned work. A 2018 Visual Designer, on the other hand, is more likely to perfecting the design journey rather than just perfecting a one-off piece.

Even if designing is a method, it carries traces of artistic elements and values from the designer, and if you can see the connection between art and design, you are more likely to understand the importance of choosing the right designer for your project.

One of the brightest (and probably most obvious) examples of a company that understands this is Apple. A lot of their success is owed to their chief designer Jonathan Ive who helped shape the design DNA for Apple as we know it.

Jonathan in his turn is influenced by Dieter Rams who was the chief designer of Braun. Mr Rams formed a design philosophy; the Good design principles. It's a list of ten paragraphs which was meant to help guide his team while designing. Aesthetics is one of these principles. However, Dieter vaguely describes this principle as "Only well-executed objects can be beautiful", which leads us back to the personal traces from the designer, something that is beyond a method but rather an artistic skill.

As a finishing note, I wish to share a film where the legendary Paul Rand explains his view of visual (graphic) design. Keep in mind that Paul is the creator of the IBM logo and he also was hired by Steve Jobs in the mid-80s for the brand identity of NeXT Computer.

Leave twenty percent to embrace the unexpected

The headline is an edited quote - the original one is from Quincy Jones, and it's "My feeling is always; leave at least twenty to thirty percent of room for the lord to walk through the room". He says it about recording in the studio - you enter the studio with a plan; the melody and lyrics, but you should leave room for the unexpected - usually that's where the magic happens. A lovely example of this is when Luther Vandross by chance was in the same studio as David Bowie when Bowie recorded Young Americans. Luther loved the song but thought it lacked harmony, and he started to sing the legendary back vocals "...Young Americans, we where young..." Mr Bowie stood up in the studio and said: "Who sang that?", and the rest is history.

The projects where I can relate to this are for example film or photo sessions. Usually, there is a plan; the script and the storyboard as guidance, but because productions are so expensive you can more or less only prepare mentally and through discussion. It's not until the moment when the crew and set are in place that you can start to explore the possibilities of how to best capture the material.

Where am I heading with this? - There is so much that happens in the process; creative work demands enough room to explore beyond the brief to deliver something extra. Quincy's thought about the creative process summarises this in those few words.

See the film Quincy on Netflix! It's just a fantastic portrait of one of the most generous and brightest musicians in our modern history. If you are curious about the story behind Young Americans, listen to P3 Soul at little over nine minutes in.