Poster Rationale - Bauhaus

I chose Bauhaus as my design movement. The reason I got so attracted to the style of the school was due to its complete elegance and modern feel of their work. What Bauhaus tries to show with their design is that design is everywhere and you can find it anywhere. The main concept that Bauhaus has is architecture, where they make posters that try to show the building point of view that they have. I chose to design a similar poster to a one made in Bauhaus (look at bottom of the page for the image). The reason I chose this particular poster was because it really shows the beginning in a new design era in the early 1900's. I started my poster on a black background to give a feel for elegance and strength. I then mainly used squared rectangles, and triangles to design the outlook of my poster. This is a thing Bauhaus is greatly known for. They use very few different shapes. This is because they want to keep it simple, yet attractive to the eye and modern. In the Bauhaus school the students were taught to use only a few colors. This is because they believe that too much color ruins the design, and gives it a crazy post-modernist feeling. The effect that you get from three contrasting colors is far greater then the effect you get from ten different colors combined. This is the reason I chose to use a grey-blue, black, yellow, and white. The reason I chose black, yellow, and white is because it’s three out of the four most influential colors within the Bauhaus history. The Bauhaus school is known for using yellow, red, black, and white. I did not choose red because it would make the poster look too hard on the eyes, so I decided to keep it simple with the colors. I used many different layers that overlap each other and create new shapes. This again is something that a lot of people did in Bauhaus only they did in Bauhaus just with paper, in order to achieve an architecture design. The Bauhaus designs symbolize structure, concrete socially critical, and surrealist works. I tried to take all of these ideas and incorporate them into my design. When you look at my poster you will see polygons with different colors overlapping but there is a great message behind it. It is supposed to represent a new era of design where architecture is straight, simple, and effective. My poster is asymmetrical and really sends out a feeling of a modern, sharp design. I used the Bauhaus font just for the title of the poster. I did this with the Bauhaus 93 font because on nearly every Bauhaus poster, the title is represented with the original Bauhaus font saying “Bauhaus”. The rest of the text was done in simple sans serif font. I used contrast in my poster to represent the title, the text, and the date stating "1919-1933". I decided to put the date of the Bauhaus years because a lot of Bauhaus posters seem to have the lively years of the school. Alignment was also a very big part in my poster. A lot of the shapes are aligned with each other for a particular reason. This reason is to keep the poster consistent just like the designers in Bauhaus do. Proximity with text was also an issue that I had to figure out, but eventually did. I tried to keep the poster simple yet I had to make sure I had 25-50 words, which looked connected to the Bauhaus title. Overall, I believe that I did a pretty good job on hitting the concept of the Bauhaus design movement. My poster looks clean, modern, and yet, very elegant.