Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer was an Austrian Graphic designer born in 1900 to 1985, widely recognised as the last living member of the Bauhaus; a school in Germanythat combined crafts and the fine arts and was famous for the approach to design it publicized and taught. While at the school Bayer was appointed as director of the new printing and advertising workshop, to open when the school moved to the city of Dessau in April 1925.

Bayer instituted the lowercase alphabet as the style for all Bauhaus printing, he also founded "universal", a geometric sans-serif font with simple curves. It combined upper and lowercase characters into a single character set and has inspired many other typefaces.

Bayer also designed the signage for Bauhaus' new building complex in Dessau which inspired "Bayer sans" by Victory type.

It was useful for me to research the background of typography in order to understand the context and styles of certain fonts. What typeface is used in media products is important as it too, portrays and creates a certain mood and context just like any other form of visual communication. For example the Bauhaus sign is a modernist, minimalist design, representing what the school taught.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayer
http://www.type.nu/bayer/index.html