Erik Spiekermann brings five unfinished fonts from Bauhaus design masters to life with Adobe

Bauhaus Dessau is legendary. Despite the art school being open for solely 14 years, the school birthed some of the world’s most influential designers and is still recognised for its strong influences on design and art today. The world-famous school of art and design was closed in 1932 by the National Socialist Party, rendering much unfinished work seemingly lost for good.

Now revered typographer Erik Spiekermann, in collaboration with Adobe’s The Lost Alphabets of Bauhaus Dessau project, is breathing fresh life into the old letter fragments and typography sketches from the Bauhaus Dessau archives by turning them into fully functional digital font sets.

Erik headed up the process of developing these early typeface designs into Typekit downloadable fonts, working with an international team of typography professionals and design students to calculate detailed shape probabilities to best interpret the unfinished work and bring the fonts to their most technically “accurate” conclusion.

With this probability data, Erik and his team used Illustrator to complete and digitise the font sets — two of which are available to download using Typekit from today, with another three of the reimagined Bauhaus masters typefaces to follow in the next few months.