Virtual Salon
May 14, 2020

Hosted by Paul Carlos, TDC President
Type Directors Club, NYC

The Bauhaus was the world’s most famous art school, and Herbert Bayer (1900–1985) was its most prolific graphic designer. This talk features up-close images from the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and from the Merrill C. Berman Collection and Display, Graphic Design Collection. It delves into Bayer’s unique design methods and the theories he refined and repeated over his long career. It will also explore Bayer’s unusual relationship with modernism’s biggest power couple (Walter and Ise Gropius) and take a look at his connection to the Third Reich.


Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, educator, and designer, whose latest books are Health Design Thinking and Extra Bold, a feminist career guide for designers. Her book Design Is Storytelling was published by Cooper Hewitt in 2017. She is the founding director of the Graphic Design MFA Program at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in Baltimore, where she authored Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, Graphic Design: The New Basics, and Type on Screen. She received the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2007, and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is dedicated to all disciplines of design. It has a permanent collection of more than 210,000 design objects fully digitized and available online, including its collection of product design, decorative arts, works on paper, graphic design, textiles, wallcoverings, and digital materials.