Herbert Bayer
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Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and architect.
Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Viennese Darmstadt Artists Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius's Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising.
In the spirit of clean simplification, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted an all-lowercase and sans-serif alphabet for all Bauhaus publications. Bayer is also credited with designed the custom geometric sans-serif font, universal.
In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office. Ten years later, he settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts.
In 1946 Bayer relocated again. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke virtually invented and promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer's architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated with Aspen until the mid-1970s.
In 1959, he designed his "fonetik alfabet", a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs "ch", "sh", and "ng". An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.
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