Developing Bauhaus Principles and Aims of the School
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Continuing the legacy of the Bauhaus, the Ulm School of Design was another radical design institution that has a huge effect on 20th century design.
In 1946, various people attempted to revive the Bauhaus's ideas in Germany after the Second World War. The school was established in 1953 by Inge Scholl in memory of her siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by the Nazis in 1943 for being members of an anti-facist resistance group. Otl Aicher and Max Bill were also founders of the school. Bill was a Swiss artist, sculpture, architect, industrial, graphic and product designer and previous student of the Bauhaus before its closure, and was the Ulm School of Designs first head master until the late 1950s.

Otl Aicher was a German graphic designer and typographer, particularly interested in corporate branding. 
Born in Ulm, Aicher was friends with the Scholl family, and was also strongly against the Nazi movement. After being arrested and forced to join the army, Aicher deserted and hid at the Scholl's family home. After the war, he attended the Academy of Fine Art Munich studying sculpture and then later married Inge Scholl, where alongside Max Bill, they established the Ulm School of Design.
In 1969, Aicher designed the brand identity for the German airline Lufthansa,  which the logo is still used today. ​Aichers interest in corporate branding resulted in him being commissioned to design the 1972 Olympic Games branding. It was requested that the design complement the architecture of the new stadium that had been built in Munich, basing his work on the 1964 Games iconography designs by Masaru Katsumie. He designed pictograms to visually interpret the sports in order for people to find their way around the stadium, using grid systems and bright colours. The colours were inspired by the Bavarian countryside and the Alps mountains of blue and white, in addition to green orange and silver, each allocated to different areas such as media and public functions. These colour themes were also used to colour coordinate staff through their uniforms relating to which department they worked in. 
The typeface 'Univers' was used for Aichers designs and twenty one sports posters were produced to advertise the games. A process called 'posterisation' was used in the graphics to separate the tones of the colours from the images; the first posters displayed were of the stadium. These designs later inspired the DOT pictograms that are seen indicating toilets and telephones all around the world. 
Aicher also designed the Munich Olympics logo, a spiral shaped garland representing the sun and the five Olympic Rings, as well as the famous dachshund mascot which had colours representing the Olympic Rings, designed to represent the resistance, tenacity and agility of all the athletes. 
In his later life, Aicher consulted for 'Bulthaup', a kitchen manufacturer, and created the 'Rotis' typeface family in 1988, before his death in 1991. 

Product Design and the Domestic Sphere 

​Any sort of formal qualifications were not required to become a student at the school, they looked for those with talent, drive and enthusiasm. Much like the Bauhaus, student studied a basic course first before moving to specialist areas that overlapped to create multi skilled designers rather than with specialist skills in one area. Topics were grouped together under general headings such as economics, politics and philosophy. The basic course consisted of studying through visual experiments (perception, symmetry), workshops (wood, metal, plastics, photography), presentation (drawing. writing) and methodology (logic, mathematics).
Visiting lecturers also created an atmosphere of constant discussion, critique and ideas coming in from other areas, and permanent lecturers were also encourage to take on work outside of the school in order to bring in more funding. 

Max Bill resigned in 1957 due to conflict with the staff regarding the progression of the school, as he was failing to recognise the importance of building industrial links in order for designers to have an influence in rebuilding society after the war.
Thomas Maldonado took over his role and wanted to move the school away from 'art' and more towards science and an objective design process. He developed the 'Ulm model', a view of design which involved the whole of society. Development groups were created where students could work with industry partners to develop and manufacture products that could make a difference in the world.

The schools approach revolved around the design of a system rather than an individual object. Areas of focus included furniture systems, construction systems, electronic systems and communication systems.
The electronic system revolved around creating products that could be multipurpose and fit into a modern, domestic environment. The school collaborated with the company 'Braun' alongside Dieter Rams, one of the most well known industrial designers, to develop new products with the students. Designs were geared more towards targeting the newer generation and their willingness to embrace new technology, which the older generations were still quite afraid of. As a result, consumerism grew.

Innovations in Graphic Design

​The school also had a communications system area of development which involved designing  marketing material, packaging, mapping etc.. 
The British designer and typography, Anthony Froshaug was among the teachers at the Ulm school of design associated with a more systematic approach to graphic design. Much of the work produced at the school was documented in a magazine which Froshaug designed, becoming quite influential to magazine design today due to his purest approach to type.

These two weeks revolved around developing confidence in drawing and sketching. 

One Point Perspective

Perspective drawings make an object appear solid using a linear illusion of depth, making objects look solid and three-dimensional. 
One point perspective uses a single vanishing point...

Moving cubes and boxes around the horizon within the frame:

Playing around with fences:

Playing around with grids/chessboards:

Playing around with ellipses/cylinders:

In 1925, the school moved to Dessau due to political pressure causing cuts in funding, but this only resulted in motivating people more to produce work that was related to social change. 
A lot of resentment from the general population in Dessau was caused by the libertarian lifestyle of those associated with the Bauhaus, and as a result in 1927 Gropius resigned as director. A new director was appointed, Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect, and previous professor of the school, who philosophy was more about meeting the needs of the people, rather than making things that were luxurious and beautiful. However, he was thought to be a threat due to his communist associations and was then deposed and replaced by the last leader of the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe. Mies van Der Rohe tried to detach any associated political involvement but despite his attempts the city council of Dessau passed a resolution to close the Bauhaus in 1932. 

The school was then moved again to Berlin in an abandoned telephone factory but financial backing had been severely cut, the building was raided and even some students were arrested and so it was decided that the Bauhaus was to be closed completely in 1933.
​Many of those who taught and studied at the school immigrated to avoid the political situation in Germany and so its ideas and ideals were spread across the world and other cultures.  In 1937, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in an attempt to continue the educational philosophy. 

The Output of the Visual Communication/ Typography Workshop

There were various workshops devoted to graphic art, one of which was printing and advertising. The other workshop was the graphic printshop, which produced limited addition prints and portfolios by the Bauhaus masters. 

One of the masters, Herbert Bayer, dedicated himself to designing new types of lettering and modern typefaces combined with very simple graphic elements.
Born April 5th 1900, the Austrian and American graphic designer began his studies as an apprentice under the architect Georg Schmidthammer and then later became a student of the Bauhaus studying wall painting under the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky. 
After graduating form the school, Bayer was appointed head of the printing and advertising workshop where he taught students about the potential of letters and layouts of type as a form of communication. He was responsible for innovations such as the 'Universal alphabet', a typeface which he created, commissioned by Gropius, that consisted of only lowercase letters. The font was made up of a simplistic geometric san-serif, and it became the schools signature font. Bayer also emphasised to his students the importance of design having a dynamic sense of composition, using geometric elements, often combined with primary colours, in order to be suitable for mass production.
Bayer designed many groundbreaking printed material and advertising graphics, containing elements such as type on its side, areas of white space, sense of alignment, abstract shapes, and photography combined with geometry, features that are so fundamental to how graphic designers work today. He also created designs for kiosks and small booths during the early 1920s, where he combined bold colours and typefaces with architecture and advertising techniques. 
Whilst working at the Bauhaus, Bayer married the photographer Irene Angela Hecht who he met at the first large Bauhaus exhibit in Weimar, and in 1928, he left the school in order to become art director of Dorland advertising agency and Vogue magazine.
Bayer then left Germany in 1938 and during this time he created/directed various exhibitions such as the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Paris alongside Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nag. He then continued working as a commercial artist and graphic designer, designing the American propaganda exhibition Road to Victory in New York, consulting at the Aspen Cultural Centre and directing the design department of the Container Corporation of America until his death in 1985.

The incredible objects originally created by the Bauhaus are seen everywhere in art and design today. The word 'bauhaus' is even used as a word to describe a certain kind of functional, modern style, illustrating the major impact the school has on design today all over the world, throughout architecture, product design and graphic design. 

Brief

For our second project we were asked to transform ourselves into an inventive 'designer' paper toy. We were required to present the made up 3D model of our character, in addition to the A4 net with associated typography, graphics, instructions and cutting lines. 
Our toy had to be in some way recognisable as ourselves, reflecting our own culture, background, interests, sense of humour and concerns. It could be rendered digitally or as traditional artwork. 

Research

Paper toys are constructed by cutting, folding and glueing paper to form desired shapes. They originate from the art of origami (research from here).
I began my research by looking at other designs for paper toys online, particularly at different ways to layout the nets to create the shapes/pieces. I wanted to be able to draw out the net myself from scratch rather than just using a template. Here are some of the ones I used for reference (links are in the captions):

Development

I first brainstormed some ideas of how I wanted my paper toy to represent me by doing a quick mind map of some of the things I associate with myself.
​For example, my interests include Harry Potter so one idea was to create myself wearing a Hogwarts robe, holding a wand or spell book. Another idea involved representing me being a vegan; wearing an avocado costume to add some humour, simply a typical outfit with the vegan symbol on the shirt, and extras such as holding vegetables to link to the stereotype of vegans only eating healthy. Here I also thought a little bit about the net itself with the idea of having an interchangeable face to show different emotions.

I then did a few quick sketches of some of the initial ideas. I decided to move away from the avocado costume idea as I wanted my paper toy to still have sharp edges and be cube-like similarity to how they are traditionally. So I focused on drawing visuals of myself wearing a typical outfit I would wear that still showed a part of my lifestyle with the design on the top.

Here are some mock ups/experiments of some of the shapes I wanted to create. Inspired by one of the paper toys I linked above, I tried to make a net for the head and hair separately as I thought it made it look like it had more dimension. 

Next I started to draw out rough diagrams of the nets for the shapes that would make up my paper toy. thinking about where the tabs needed to be placed for gluing. I chose to create nets for the top, left arm and right arm, bottoms, head, a hair piece and a base. 

I then decided to draw the nets onto graph paper in order to keep them as accurate as possible. Using a light pad, I cut around the nets so that I could arrange them to fit on A4 paper before scanning them and drawing them out digitally on Procreate, making sure the lines were crisp and clean.

After this, I constructed the mock up nets into their 3D models using a craft knife and ruler to cut out the nets, score the fold lines and glue the tabs together.

Once I was happy with the nets, it was time to add colour. Using my preliminary sketches of designs as inspiration, I used Procreate to colour my paper toy. I wanted it to be realistic and true to my likeness, but in a cartoony style. I coloured the tabs black to make it clear they were the parts to add glue to and also made the lines that are scored and folded as dashes.
I then designed the page to include instructions for construction as well as labels to each of the pieces to make it look more like a finished product. 

Overall, I am happy with my finished paper toy and I feel it fits the brief well as it represents me and my interests. The things I think I could improve on the most is that my research could have been more thorough, in addition to the amount of initial ideas being drawn up as thumbnails so that I had more designs to work from. However, I did experiment with the nets and shapes and how I could draw out the grids before committing to the final piece, showing development from start to finish. Below is the made up 3D model of my paper toy. 

Early Modernism/Cultural Determinism

Modernism was a sustained period of innovation and expansion in the arts, starting roughly from the 1800s to the late 1970s. There are a few key themes: 
Modernism is told as a great meta-narrative. Going through the 20th century it is told by key figures such as artists critics, historians, and has a sense of hierarchy and order. It also signifies a conventional, patriarchal view of art and design history.
Showing a a quest for originality through constant experimentation in literature, music, visual arts and architecture, it was a series of interlinking movements. 

Another key theme was determinism. From the 1870s innovation in science, technology, and industry and changing socio-political ideas was closely linked to the changes in art. The philosopher Karl Marx broke down society into the infrastructure (economic sphere of productive activity) and the super structure (social sphere).
He argued that change happens at different speeds in each sphere and what happens in the infrastructure determines the superstructure.

The Shock of the New and Crisis of Representation

​The old ways of portraying the world were no longer relevant. The idea of a static image of one perspective no longer made sense so new ways had to be thought up in order to depict the new interactions with industry and technology, time and space, changing social conditions and notions of peoples identity. It's now a more complex world.

20th Century Paris (Post-Impressionism)

In 1889, Paris held the Exposition Universelle, a world's fair to showcase art and technology side by side. The Eiffel Tower was a big symbol of modernism and so served as the entrance into the fair.

Impressionists were revolutionists, painted real everyday life, usually outdoors with a first person view. It was developed by artists such as Claude Monet who's work showed a greater understanding of light and colour in natural scenes by working quickly. Post-impressionism, however, describes the changes that came about after the Exposition. One of the major figures who developed the art movement was George Seurat, a French artist best known for introducing the painting techniques chromoluminarism and pointillism. His work differs from classic Impressionism as even though he is still painting what is real, his work was heavily pre-thought out in a studio before resulting in the final piece. 
Another important Post-Impressionist was the French artist Paul Cézanne, who's work is characterised by vivid colours and constructive painterly brushstrokes to create geometric forms. His work also featured creative perspectives; his paintings would often show the subject from different angles at the same time, which later became a major influence on Cubism.

20th Century Milan (Futurism)

​Futurism was a movement that originated in Italy which emphasised speed, technology, youth, and violence. A lot of Futurist art contains themes such as the car, airplane and the industrial city. Founded in Milan by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a manifesto was brought out where he was joined by painters such as Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla. Futurists wanted you to be energised and motivated. 
​Boccioni's painting 'The City Rises' is a good example of Futurism, symbolising manual labour through the rapid movements of the crowd scene. Similarly, Balla's painting 'Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash' shows the action in blurred frames depicting light, movement and speed. 

Modernism can be seen as a design for living. Structuralism implies we are formed and influenced by our surroundings; form follows function. 

20th Century Moscow (Constructivism)

Post Russian revolution saw the first flush of communism. Film makers, artists and designers were used as messengers of the state and to create its visual identity. The western idea of the artist was rejected; they would use their talent as artists to get messages out using words and images as agents of revolution to influence society. This became known as Constructivism; a belief that art should reflect the modern industrial world.
Agitprop was designed to get people attention, motivate and get people to do stuff. Posters were created that were assertive, powerful in order to be used as mass communication. They featured dynamic geometric layouts but were restrained to limited colour options, fonts and usually made from recycled materials. They also featured heavy use of photography, using the power of image to grab peoples attention.

The Stenberg Brothers were Soviet artists and graphic designers famous for their cinema posters which were nearly all of them were illustrated. They actually developed an overhead projector that allowed them to project images onto the posters and play with geometric forms, distort perspective, crop and montage elements and type.
One of their most famous posters was for the silent film Battleship Potemkin. The piece has strong features of industry and modern warfare capturing the viewer with bold and powerful colours. Geometric elements seen through the use of diagonals as opposed to static verticals create a more dynamic perspective to the composition in addition to exaggerating scale.

Another Russian artist associated with the Constructivist movement was El Lissitzky who is thought to have pioneered geometric collages of just photographs. The piece 'The Constructor' features himself with his hand over his face holding a compass. The highlighted eye gives the impression that he is symbolising the notion of the idea to production. It differs to the Stenberg Brothers work as it is has no colour, thought to make his face stand out more. The lines are are sharp, precise and distinct which represents the revolution of the machine. The type 'XYZ' symbolises the idea that it is the end of the last art movement; futurism is the future. It is overall a very powerful image. 

Presentation

The next tasks involved working on our presentation skills, mounting postcards, drawing out shapes pristinely and embossing. Each of these had to have specific size requirements and be centred correctly. 

Cutting

We then moved on the cutting. Tasks included cutting out a circle perfectly with a 40mm radius, cutting out and mounting type in a specific size and font and creating our own decorative paper cut out using a craft knife. 

The Third Dimension

These tasks involved making 3-D shapes of specific measurements, experimenting with surface patterns and creating our own paper sculptures using cutting and folding techniques. 

Paper Play Session

This sessions aim was to encourage us to think about folding, cutting, light and shape by creating mini pop-ups and photograph them from a series of different angles.

Anatomy of Type and Type Personality Workshop

​There are different features that make up letters. For this workshop we were tasked to render a sentence accurately on tracing paper, making sure to consider the anatomy of each character, 'thicks and thins', and the leading and kerning of each character/word.

The Brief

For our first two week project we worked as a team to create a book of experimental typography consisting of lines of text we were each given to work with to create our own individual pages. The final book is to be commercially printed and sold at the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival.

A comic is most commonly described as being made up of a series of panels containing images used to express ideas. These are usually combined with text or other visual information (research from here). As graphic designers, our aim was to use type and typography to interpret and create an abstract response to the text we were given. The compositions had to be entirely typographic and created using analogue techniques and in addition to this, we were restricted to using only black and one other colour of our choosing. The aim of this project was experimentation and exploration, rather than design problem solving. 

Research

To start me off on the right track I began with researching experimental typography to gain some inspiration. Experimental typography can include altering and manipulating the shapes of letters, playing with letter spacing (white/black space), font size, texture, and layout to create new unique designs (research from here and here).
One of the graphic designers I looked into was the Swiss typography work of Wolfgang Weingart, who is known for breaking the rules of typesetting. I was particularly interested in his technique of distorting type by spacing out letters, curving lines, collaging and reorganising type to create new compositions. Furthermore, another designer I liked was Chris Ashworth, who similarly to Weingart, was inspired by Swiss design, known for using barcodes, horizontal lines and multiple transparent layers (research from here)

In conclusion, all of this massively shaped the Aesthetic Movement as it continued to grow and inspire art and architecture, focusing on producing art that was for its own sake rather than to express a greater meaning. ​