Visiting the art museum Gelsenkirchen recently, I came across a small exhibition of prints by Anton Stankowski and his associate Karl Duschek. In German design circles Stankowski is mainly known for having designed the logo of the Deutsche Bank (see below). Looking at the exhibited prints, my impressions wavered between delight and distaste. I had rarely seen design work that seemed so typically German, both in a positive and a negative sense.

Researching further about the life and work of Anton Stankowski lead me to two digital exhibitions. A website is available that shows parts of an exhibition from 2006 commemorating Stankowski’s 100^th birthday. A current exhibition in Berlin about Stankowski and Duschek’s corporate design work, titled „Marken:Zeichen. Das Grafische Atelier Stankowski + Duschek“, is available as a virtual tour (texts in German only).

During his lifetime Stankowski had contact with some of the most notable German and Swiss graphic designers, of which I will name only a selection here. The mutual influences might be one reason why his work seems so typical for postwar Germany.

Anton Stankowski was born in 1906 in Gelsenkirchen. After an apprenticeship as a decorative painter, he studied at the Folkwang University in Essen under Max Burchartz from 1927 on. Max Burchartz was one of the proponents of a modernist layout style (Elementare Typografie) that combined grotesque fonts, black and white photography, and photo collages.

From 1929 on Stankowski worked in Zürich, Switzerland. There he was part of a circle of artists that included Herbert Matter and Max Bill. Herbert Matter is mainly known for posters that integrate text and photographs. Max Bill is known today for his Bauhaus style watches, and for being a founding member and director of the influential Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm.

From 1938 on Stankowski worked in Stuttgart, Germany, There he was again part of a circle of artists and designers, among them Willi Baumeister, again an important proponent of modernist typography.

In 1964 Anton Stankowski lectured at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. This school was a design school in the tradition of the Bauhaus, with a strongly functionalist leaning. The school only existed from 1953 to 1968.

From 1960 to 1972 Stankowski was head of the committee for the visual design of the Olympic Games in Munich. The pictograms that Otl Aicher designed for the Olympics are today seen as landmarks of information design. Otl Aicher also happens to be one of the founders of the HfG Ulm.

In 1972 Karl Duschek, 41 years younger than Stankowski, entered Stankowski’s design agency. In 1982 the agency was renamed to Stankowski + Duschek. Many of the corporate designs created by Stankowski were thus codesigned by Duschek. Nevertheless Karl Duschek remains largely unknown to the general public today. In 1998 Anton Stankowski died in Esslingen near Stuttgart.

From today’s perspective it is notable that Stankowski made no distinction between art and design: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s art or design, it only has to be good.” He extensively noted visual ideas in his sketchbooks. His artworks he realized in different media: drawings, paintings, prints, photographies, and sculptures. Visual ideas that he developed in his free artworks found their way into his functional graphic designs. A visual element typical for his work is the diagonal line, which can also be seen in the Deutsche Bank Logo. Today the Stankowski foundation awards a price to people that combine art and design. The photos below show some art prints by Stankowski and Duschek at display in the art museum Gelsenkirchen.

Anton Stankowski was a pioneer of corporate design, working together with Karl Duschek from 1972 on. Many renowned German institutions hired Stankowski. Companies that are still using his logos today include Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Börse, Messe Frankfurt, Münchener Rückversicherung, Deutscher Werkbund, Viessmann and many others (also see picture below for some logo examples). Stankowski and Duschek did not just develop logos, but full corporate designs in the modern sense. Use of the logo, colors, layouts, and other visual elements were specified for the clients in corporate design manuals.

Anton Stankowski’s work seems typical for postwar Germany to me. His visual language is straightforward and clear. Forms are geometrically constructed with straight lines. These forms look like they were devised on an engineer’s drawing board. Colors are bright, clear, and contrasting. A red is red and an orange is orange, there is no place for subtle shades and nuances. The use of forms and colors could be interpreted as a late echo of the Bauhaus design language. There forms were constructed from the basic geometric elements of squares, circles and triangles. At the Bauhaus the three primary colors blue, red, and yellow were mainly used.

The corporate designs seem systematic, rational, and functional. Stankowski often used the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk (very similar to Helvetica preferred by Swiss graphic designers), which further reinforced the neutral and rational impression.

The characteristics listed up to now are rather positive: straightforward, clear, systematic, rational. These are traits that were and are still associated with German design and engineering. However, looking at Stankowski’s designs from today’s perspective, a lot of it also seems horribly blunt, brutish even. There are no ornamental elements in his designs, nothing that is not systematically constructed. This leaves no place for elegance, sophistication, or humor.

In my opinion this reveals something about German culture in general. We tend to focus on the concept and are wary of too much outward pomp. If something is too beautifully packaged we doubt that it can deliver functionality. I have worked extensively with French, and also with Italian and Spanish colleagues. These are cultures that seem to put much more emphasis on outward elegance. With the instantaneous exchange of visual ideas via the internet nowadays, strong cultural differences between designers and artists are disappearing. Still it seems worthwhile to note design traits that seem specific to some countries.

The Red Dot Design Museum in Essen currently has a special exhibition on Simplicity as a Design Principle (until 06.03.2020). In this article I summarize the main messages of this exhibition.

The Red Dot Design Museum’s ongoing permanent exhibition shows products that have been awarded the prestigious Red Dot Design Award. Appointed jurors gather once a year to grant this award to submitted products. The recognition tends to be given to simple elegant designs. But outward aethetics are not the only considered criteria. The considered four qualities of good design are the qualities of function, seduction, use, and responsibility.

The current small special exhibition puts a spotlight on simplicity in product design. The exhibition is structured into several sections each of which is titled with a statement in the form of „Simplicity is ….“. A short text elaborates on each such aspect. Each aspect is demonstrated with one specific simple product, usually presented together with an older elaborate product. Several similar simple products of the same type are also exhibited.

Here a summary of the main points, restructured from my point of view:

The introductory text of the exhibition brochure sees simplicity in design as a result of the industrialisation. In the 18th century the upper and middle classes favored heavily ornamented products in Baroque and Rococo style, imitating the lifestyle of the artistocracy. Such products could not be industrially mass produced, however. So when mass production took off in the late 18th and early 19th century, much simpler and cheaper products were produced and became popular (note: influencing the popular taste to prefer simpler products was an agenda of the Deutscher Werkbund). Major figures that played a role in this transitional period were the industrial designer Peter Behrens, and the architect Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus school in 1919.

The exhibition makes the following key statements:

Simplicity is modern: the contemporary aesthetic of simplicity was developed in the art epoch of modernism. This aspect is demonstrated by the Red and Blue chair, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s (Photo source: Wikimedia commons: Ellywa). Rietveld was an adherent of the dutch De Stijl movement which strongly influenced the German Bauhaus.

Simplicity is puristic: the aesthetic of simplicity omits ornaments. This point is demonstrated with the Mono A cutlery, designed by Peter Raacke in 1959 (photo source: Mono).

Simplicity is based on geometry: simple products are often designed in geometric shapes. This principle is exemplified by three stools in a circle shape (Stool 60 by Alvar Aalto, 1933), triangular shape (Tibalt by Matthias Scherzinger, 2017), and rectangular shape (Ulm Stool by Max Bill, 1954).

Simplicity is democratic: simple products tend to be low priced and thus afforable for everyone. The Fiat Nova 500 is shown as an example of this principle. The very compact car with a length of 2,97 m and a width of 1,32 m had only the most basic technical features. With its low purchase price it was possible for many people to fulfill their dream of their own car.

Simplicity is the right balance: simple products achieve the right balance between too many and not enough features. The historic draisine is shown to demonstrate this point. Without gears, brakes, or lighting it is simpler than today’s bicycle. But it is too uncomfortable, too unsafe, too simple. On the other extreme today’s bicycles can be technically highly complex. A good balance is achieved by contemporay simple bicyle designs that reduce the technical complexity (example shown below: Schindelhauer Bike by Stephan Zehren and Jörg Schindelhauer).

Simplicity is easy to use: simple products are self-explanatory and need no instructions for use. This aspect is demonstrated with contemporary coffee machines ( photo below on the right: Lumero by Ernst Köhler for WMF, 2019, a more complex machine on the left: Europiccola, inhouse design for La Pavioni, 1950). These allow the user to easily make coffee of constant high quality with the press of a button.

Simplicity is innovative: the development of simple products can drive innovation. This aspects is demonstrated with the Thonet No. 4 chair, designed by Michael Thonet in 1859. Thonet perfected the technique of bending solid wood. This allowed to produce stable chairs with muss less material. Each Thonet No. 4 chair was dissassembled into six parts which were shipped all over to world in a space-saving manner.

Simplicity is driven by new technologies: technological advancements allow to design simpler products. LED table lights demonstrated this. Because LED lights emit no heat, lamps do not need big lampshades for ventilation and heat isolation any more. Also, because LED lights are much lighter and smaller, table lamps don’t need heavy pedestals any more.

Simplicity is not simple: simple products can hide complexity under a simple exterior. This point is demonstrated with multifunctional flatscreen TVs. Though they are much slimmer and outwardly simpler than the older cathode ray tube TVs, they contain many more functionalities.

The exhibition provides some interesting perspectives on simplicity in design. As someone who has read and thought a lot about this topic, I have a few objections, however. The exhibition focuses on simplicity as a product aesthetic for the German / European upper and middle class. No mention is made that Asian, notably Japanese, art and design had developed an aesthetic of simplicity centuries before western modernism. A point that would also deserve some attention is how simplicity and the principle of „form follows function“ has always been present in western peasant and craftsman culture, as can for example be seen in farming and handicraft tools.

For further information on the exhibition, you can download the nicely designed brochure, containing both the German and English text. The exhibit contained little text beyond that given in the brochure.

Ever since I visited the Bauhaus archive and museum in Berlin many years ago, I am a fan of Bauhaus design. However, my understanding of what „Bauhaus design“ actually is was rather vague. In the last months I had the opportunity to visit many further exhibitions which are commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. These exhibitions and reading up on the topic have lead me to a deeper understanding about what is specific about Bauhaus design. In this article I will explain the historic background, typical characteristics of Bauhaus architecture, product design and graphic design. I will also discuss reasons for why the Bauhaus became one of the most influential design schools of the 20th century.

The Bauhaus was a German design school, active from 1919 to 1933 subsequently in the cities Weimar (1919 – 1925), Dessau (1925 – 1932), and Berlin (1932 – 1933). The relocations and final closing of the school were due to pressure from the rising Nazi party, who were opposed to the liberal views and the internationality of staff and students at the school. At the Bauhaus many contemporary trends in art, design, and architecture were taken up, amalgamated and further developed into what would become modern design.

At different times, different personalities were active at the Bauhaus. This makes it difficult to talk about it as one homogenous school of thought on design. At least four phases can be identified with different emphases:

1919 – 1922: Expressionist and handicraft phase: Architect Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar with the aim of teaching all applied art disciplines required for furnishing buildings („Bau“ means building, „-haus“ means house). In contrast to academic art schools of that time, students were educated in handicrafts in workshops. The concept of artist-craftsmen/artisans had previously already been advocated by the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten introduced and lead the seminal „Vorkurs“ (preliminary course) in which students learned to design with colors and materials in a playful experimental way. The work of students followed the aesthestic of expressionism, the dominant art movement in Germany at that time.

1923 – 1928: Constructivist geometric phase: When Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy took over the Vorkurs (together with Josef Albers), he introduced concepts from Russian Constructivism. Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg gave lectures at the Bauhaus in which he introduced the De Stijl art movement. The Bauhaus started to cooperate with companies that industrially produced prototypes developed in the workshops. The combination of these three influences resulted in the design style which is most associated with the Bauhaus today.

1928 – 1930: Industrial design for the people phase: Architect Hannes Meyer was appointed second director of the Bauhaus in Dessau. He criticized the dogmatic following of the prevailing Bauhaus style, and advocated for more functionality. Holding socialist views, he also criticized that the Bauhaus up to that time had mainly designed luxury products for the rich. During that time the most profitable cooperations between the Bauhaus and companies took place, notably with the company Rasch for the Bauhaus wallpaper.

1930 – 1933: Architectural phase: When the third Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, again an architect by profession, took over, he reformed the Bauhaus into an architecture school.

As already explained, the second of these four phases is the one for which Bauhaus design is most known today. My further discussion will focus on this phase, with many aspects also being relevant for the more functional third phase. Specific design characterstics can be noted for architecture, product design, and graphic design. Paintings associated with the Bauhaus tend to have individual abstract and expressionist styles of the corresponding artists (namely Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, all of them teachers a the school). Other art genres such as Bauhaus textile design and Bauhaus dance are not considered here.

All three Bauhaus directors Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were architects by profession. Strangely the Bauhaus only started giving courses on architecture in 1927 when Gropius appointed Meyer for this function. During their time as directors they were given several building commissions. Usually the Bauhaus workshops were then involved in furnishing the buildings.

Typical characteristics of the designed houses are:

• The buildings are made up of cuboids with flat roofs.
• Exterior and often also interior walls are colored white.
• There are no ornamental elements. This property of modern architecture had notably been advocated by Austrian architect Adolf Loos in his 1910 lecture Ornament and Crime.
• The buildings often have large window fronts.
• The buildings were ususally designed to include a contemporary high standard of sanitary and heating installations.

As an example, the photo below shows the Meisterhaus Kandinsky/Klee in Dessau, 1925 by Walter Gropius. The building exhibits all characteristics listed above. It was one of several buildings that Gropius designed for senior staff of the Bauhaus in Dessau. (Photo source: Thomas Wolf / Wüstenrot Stiftung)

Other examples of typical Bauhaus architecture are:

• Haus am Horn in Weimar, 1923, designed by Bauhaus student Georg Muche. The house and its interior design served as a first public demonstration of Bauhaus work.
• Bauhaus Dessau, 1925, by Walter Gropius. The building was designed to accomodate the school as it moved to Dessau.
• The White City in Tel Aviv, 1930s, by diverse architects. These 4000 buildings were designed by Jewish former Bauhaus students who fled from the rise of the Nazis to Israel.

Bauhaus style architecture would later be seen as a part of International Style architecture. All three Bauhaus directors were featured in the defining 1932 exhibiton at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition and the influential associated book/catalogue.

As in architecture, products designed at the Bauhaus had a specific style and influenced product design thereafter. Typical characteristics of the designed products are:

• Objects are assembled from basic shapes such as spheres, cubes, cones etc. Students were encouraged to rethink products starting from their basic functionality. This lead to geometric, minimalist designs that broke with the traditional forms of such products. The principle of geometric construction was adapted from Russian Constructivism.
• Often only a basic color palette is used, consisting of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow and the achromatic colors white, grey, and black. This color scheme was adopted from the De Stijl art movement were it was intended to be universal i.e. objective and international.
• Designed products were intended to be industrially mass produced. This resulted in simple products without ornamental elements. Industrial materials, namely metal and glass, were used in new ways. The demand for the development of product designs appropriate for industrial manufacturng had previously been made by the Deutscher Werkbund, of which Walter Gropius was also a member.

The photo below shows a typical Bauhaus product, the Table lamp WG24, 1924, by Wilhelm Wagenfeld. It notably shows the construction from geometric elements and the use of the industrial materials metal and glass. (Photo source: Tecnolumen)

The photo below shows a cradle designed by Peter Kehler in 1922. It shows the construction from geometric elements and the use of primary colors. (Photo Source: Klassik Stiftung Weimar).

Other typical product designs of the Bauhaus are:

• Chess pieces, 1924, by Josef Hartwig. Showing geometric construction. Black and natural wood are the only colors.
• Tea Infuser, 1924, by Marianne Brandt. Showing geometric construction and new use of metal. Black is used as the only color
• Wassily Chair (model B3), 1925, by Marcel Breuer. Showing geometric construction and innovative use of steel pipes. Black is used as the only color.

Similar principles as in architecture and product design were also applied in graphic design. Typical characteristics of Bauhaus graphic design products are:

• Sans serif fonts and geometric sans serif fonts were used, notably Schelter & Giesecke (breite halbfette) Grotesk and in later years Futura (1927 by Paul Renner, not himself active at the Bauhaus). Diverse bespoke headline fonts were designed. These were typically geometrically constructed. Notable examples are Herbert Bayers’s draft for an universal font (1925), based on a circle shape, and Josef Albers stencil font Schablonierschrift (realized together with Paul Renner as Futura Black) and the modular Kombinationsschrift (1928).
• Efforts were made in standardization, both in standardization of fonts as well as in paper formats according to DIN (Deutsches Insitut für Normung) specifications.
• Only small case letters were used in texts. This was introduced at the Bauhaus in 1925.
• Few ornamental non-textual elements were used, with the exception of horizontal and vertical bars.
• Often red was used as the only color with otherwise black on white content.
• Black and white photography was used instead of previously used printed graphics. Photographs were usually held in an objective tone. This documentary style called Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) was introduced at the Bauhaus by Lucia Moholy, and later perfected outside the Bauhaus notably by Albert Renger-Patzsch. A contrasting type of photography at the Bauhaus was Neues Sehen (new seeing), which often took on unusual perspectives in an experimental way. This type of photography was favored by Lázló Moholy-Nagy.

Moholy-Nagy’s style of graphic design was influenced notably by constructivist El Lissitzky and dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Outside the Bauhaus, this graphic style was further refined by Jan Tschichold and became known as Neue Typografie (new typography) or Elementare Typografie (elementary typography). Nazi propaganda took up some of the elements of this style notably in propaganda posters. Swiss typographers took up many elements in the 1950s into Swiss Style typography.

The picture below shows Herbert Bayer’s design for an universal font. The font consists only of small case letters. Such geometric fonts based on a circle shape are most associated with the Bauhaus today.

The picture below shows a typical example of Bauhaus graphic design, an advertisement brochure for the city of Dessau by Joost Schmidt, 1926.

Other typical examples of Bauhaus graphic design are:

• Bauhaus books, 1925 – 1930, edited by Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius.
• Bauhaus magazine, 1926 – 1931, by diverse editors.
• Advertisment brochure for the Bauhaus wallpaper, 1931, by Joost Schmidt
• The „Bauhaus“ sign at the main building in Dessau, 1929

Some of the Bauhaus designs listed above still look great from today’s perspective. However, the dogmatically geometric construction of some designs make them seem somewhat clunky and unergonomic today.

The style of Bauhaus design influenced following generations of designers. The architectural style was incorporated into International Style architecture. Product designs influenced modern, minimalist, industrially produced goods. Examples coming to mind are electric appliances by Braun which later in turn influenced Steve Jobs at Apple, or scandinavian design such as furniture by Ikea. Typographic and graphic design principles of that time were later taken up notably by Swiss Style graphic design.

Ironically one of the reasons why the school was so influential was it’s closure in 1933 under pressure from the rising Nazi party. Staff and students were then dissipated all over the world. Foreigners returned to their home countries. Jewish students fled to Israel. Many former Bauhaus teachers emmigrated to the USA. From 1933 on Josef and Anni Albers, later also Walter Gropius, and other former Bauhaus teachers taught at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers transferred the teaching methods of the Bauhaus with its Vorkurs. In 1937 Lázló Moholoy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Only in 1953 did a design school in the tradition of the Bauhaus reopen in Germany, the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. Among the founders was the former Bauhaus student Max Bill.

Former director Walter Gropius later worked on spreading the myth of the Bauhaus. Due to German Bauhaus design being dissociated from Nazi reign 1933 – 1945 and World War II, it was recognized as a German design tradition both in post-war Germany as well as abroad.

I recently designed an advertising beachflag. Such classic graphic design tasks are usually not part of my work. But in this case the assignment came from my mother who sells self-produced honey, marmelade, and similar products on local markets. To my surprise I learned quite a few things about what to consider when designing for visual impact at large distances or at small sizes. I will explain these points in this article.

I prepared several design variants of the beachflag. In the picture below you see an intermediate design on the left, in comparison to the final design on the right, from up close/large and from a distance/small.

The intermediate version on the left looks better to me from up close. The handwritten script fits the theme of homemade honey and marmelade. The dark brown contours and yellowish white of the bees’s wings give the image a soft, warm touch. However, when viewed from a distance and at a small size, the elegant handwritten script quickly becomes illegible. Subtle color details are also lost. Visually the image is reduced to yellow, orange, black and white.

To account for these effects, I made several modifications in the final version. I decided to use a better readable sans-serif font that still suits the theme. Having the text run vertically normally isn’t good for readability, but in this case allows to use much bigger letters. Using only uppercase letters also makes the text better readable at a distance. I increased the contrast of the used colors, by replacing brown by black and yellowish-white by white. It would also have been warranted to simplify the image to a more abstract iconic version. I decided against it because I had previously constructed the image from a pencil drawing, and a more iconic version would probably have meant starting again from scratch. I also a added a small watermark at the bottom of the flag. In orange on the yellow background it is intended to disappear when viewed from a distance.

Below is what the beachflag printed by beachflags.com finally looked like. Creases and their shadows can be seen to reduce visibility a bit.

In a nutshell these are the things that I learned should be considered when designing for viewing at large distances or at small sizes:

• Text: use well readable, simple non-serif fonts, use proportionally larger font sizes in comparsion to your text area, use bolder fontweights and uppercase lettering to improve readability
• Images: reduce images to abstract icons, use only areas or widen contours
• Colors: use only 2-3 colors with high contrast, a colorful background with neutral-colored content works better than the other way around

All of these points are fulfilled by european traffic signs which are of course designed for maximal recognizability under varying circumstances. It is an interesting coincidence that the color combination yellow-black chosen for the topic of bees and honey here, is also one of the classic high-contrast color combinations used for traffic signs. Other such color combinations with strong contrast in color and brightness are red-white-black and blue-white-black.

Additional Note 13.05.2019: I simplified the bee icon further for printing it on workwear shirts. This version is reduced to a single color and simpler surfaces. It can be seen that this version works even better for viewing at distances and at small sizes. (The shirt is shown in worn condition here.)