journal
the thinking behind the rules: principles, concepts, icons and geometry.
the journal
what this is
short essays on the ideas behind the system: the principles the school taught, the geometry the shapes obey, how an icon is built and why a corner is square. each one ends with the rule it explains.
how it is set
headlines stay lowercase. the articles are set in sentence case, because long reading needs capitals as signposts. that rule is itself the subject of one of them.
articles
16 pieces, in the order they were written.
The slogan is older than the school and vaguer than it sounds. What it actually asks of a chair, a button and a poster.
Three shapes carry the whole system. Where the trio comes from, how to draw all three with a compass and a ruler, and why they are not the same size.
Every corner in werkstatt is ninety degrees. It is the one decision that makes everything else look like one thing.
Every icon in the set is a stack of circles, squares, triangles and bars. The home icon built step by step, then the search icon, then the rules that fall out of them.
Mies made the phrase famous and Browning wrote it first. How to turn it from a slogan into a test.
At the Bauhaus color was taught as a material with rules, not a mood. Itten, Albers, the three primaries, and why red does exactly one thing.
Interfaces stay orthogonal; posters are allowed to tilt. Both come from one idea of balance, which is not symmetry.
The school dropped capitals in 1925 and printed its reasons at the foot of its letterhead. We keep the habit for display and give capitals back where reading needs them.
At Dessau steel looked like steel and glass like glass. What material honesty means when the material is light.
Forty by twenty-six, three shapes, two overlaps. The numbers inside the werkstatt mark and what each one does.
Every color, size and space in werkstatt is named once. How the three layers of tokens work, why the names are roles and not colors, and what happens when one changes.
Size, weight, color and position each give an element a rank. The system uses all four, in a fixed order, so that a screen reads the same way to everyone.
A button is five things in a row: resting, hovered, focused, pressed, disabled. How the system assigns a look to each state, and why the assignment never changes.
Every Bauhaus student began with the Vorkurs, a half year of unlearning. What it taught, who taught it, and how a five-minute daily exercise descends from it.
The perception laws that explain the system's layout rules: why gaps belong inside groups, why one color means one category, and why three overlapping shapes read as a single mark.
A hundred years in six stops: the new typography, the Ulm school, the Swiss grid, Helvetica, atomic design and the token. Where werkstatt's rules come from, stop by stop.