Bauhaus lessons for designers and UX professionals

Today we are writing about the Bauhaus and how this artistic movement has influenced both design, broadly speaking, and User Experience and Product Design.

Bauhaus was a German art school founded in the Weimar Republic period and lasted from 1919 to 1933. It had a huge influence in arts, architecture, publication design and on visuals at that time, and played a key role in the renaissance of design during the 60s in Germany.

Bauhaus Dessau. Bon Adrien.

DesignLab wrote an article some time ago about its influence on design, including some interesting examples. We are resuming here the lessons that Bauhaus left for us.

Five Bauhaus lessons for designers

Even though the lessons we can learn from Bauhaus POV are countless, we would like to focus on 5 principles that are key when it comes to design:

1. Back to basics: Art Nouveau or Arts&Crafts were baroque-ish and ornamental, but Bauhaus simplified all this and went back to armonious and simple designs, breaking with all artistic movements from that era.
2. Form follows function: when designing a product or a building, its form is more important than its functionality. Bauhaus approach was the complete opposite: first, the definition of the functionality and then the form was developed.
3. Break the rules: there are some rigid design rules to follow, but some of them have no scientific basis or are outdated because of technology advances. So, breaking these rules is a step forward.
4. Think big even for small works: even if a task seems small or simple, there is always room for improvement.
5. Get your hands dirty: if you want to improve your skills and become a real master, you need to do something by yourself. This way you will find out restrictions and difficulties. If you are going to develop any product, the best approach is get your hands directly into it.

Five examples of Bauhaus influence on digital products and UX

There’s no question about the major impact of Bauhaus regarding UX, however 5 specific examples can be highlighted for product design and user experience:

1. Economy and hierarchy: for a digital product, hierarchy along with element economy are key. This is when Bauhaus comes to be one of the main inspirations for product designers and UX designers: these principles are on the foundations of this movement.
2. Colour as meaning: emotions are transmitted through colours and these make objects and elements to have a meaning. Bauhaus was the first artistic movement to actively and consciously use this for their designs and colour is now one of the key elements of any design.
3. Rational and legible typography: one of the main contributions of the Bauhaus to graphic design are rational and legible typographies, moving from Fraktur scripts used until the 30s to other modern options such as Arkidenz Grotesk, one of the Helvetica antecessors, as well as some other sans-serif fonts that are now widely used on digital products.
4. The grid: probably one of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is the grid, which Müller-Brockmann explained widely in his book Grid Systems in Graphic Design. This publication turned the Bauhaus grid system mainstream and now it can be easily implemented into any digital product thanks to frameworks and CSS.
5. Products responding to the users’ needs: Bauhaus was the first artistic movement to design products with a user-centric approach, apart from aesthetics. When rediscovered in the 60s, the user-centered design era began.

As you can see, Bauhaus has a huge influence in today’s digital product design, even if we don’t acknowledge it. If you want to learn more about the Bauhaus and its legacy, this Harvard Art Museums virtual tour should be the next step on your journey.