In the first years of the Bauhaus at Weimar, typography did not yet play the central role it was later to take on. For Johannes Itten and Lothar Schreyer, calligraphy was essentially an artistic means of expression. At first, practical fields of application remained seldom and were restricted to small, miscellaneous printed matters.

With the appointment of Moholy-Nagy in 1923, which was to introduce the ideas of "New Typography" to the Bauhaus, the situation radically changed. He considered typescript to be primarily a communications medium, and was concerned with the "clarity of the message in its most emphatic form". His influence is clearly visible already in 1923 in the advertising campaign for the large Bauhaus exhibition of summer 1923. Moholy-Nagy designed the layout for the exhibition publication and further took over the typography of the "Bauhaus books".

From then on, typography at the Bauhaus was closely connected to corporate identity and to the development of an unmistakable image for the school. Characteristic for the design were clear, unadorned type prints, the articulation and accentuation of pages through distinct symbols or typographic elements highlighted in colour, and finally direct information in a combination of text and photography, for which the name "Typofoto" was created.
In addition, the consideration of economic factors led to the usage of normed formats, a partly simplified spelling, and more particularly, the abolition of capitalization.
In Weimar, next to Moholy-Nagy, both Joost Schmidt and Herbert Bayer had also been concerned with typography. In Dessau, Bayer took over the newly installed workshop for printing and advertising and rapidly transformed it into a professional studio for graphic design. He intensively developed Avant-garde typesetting and his posters and printed matters show a concern with contemporary themes from the psychology of advertising.
Following his departure from the Bauhaus in 1928, Bayer continued to work at first in Germany, later in the USA, and became one of the most influential graphic designers of the twentieth century.

Joost Schmidt was his successor at the Bauhaus. He introduced a systematic course for the design of lettering and advertising graphics and expanded it to the practice of exhibition design. Examples of the applicability of experimental forms of presentation in architecture, sculpture, photography, and typography were presented in Bauhaus travelling exhibitions and at conventions in and outside Germany. The stands were designed by the advertising workshop.

A workshop for printmaking existed only at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1921, Lyonel Feininger was artistic director, master craftsman was the lithographer Carl Zaubitzer.
The production of graphic series and portfolios of the Bauhaus masters, started in 1921, stood at the peak of the workshop activity. Amongst them were Feininger's "Twelve woodcuts" and Kandinsky's portfolio "Small worlds". A "Master Portfolio of the State Bauhaus" was published as the first title of the "Bauhaus Verlag" (Bauhaus edition).

In 1921, parallel to these works, the ambitious project "New European Graphics" began: Five portfolios with which the Bauhaus aimed at bringing together not only the artistic forms of expression of the school, but in addition, all the important tendencies of the international Avant-garde - from Futurism to Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism - were produced.
The first portfolio introduced the Bauhaus masters, the consecutive ones presented works by German, Italian, and Russian artists. A portfolio with French prints remained incomplete. The names of the artists - from Chagall to Schwitters, de Chirico to Kokoschka, Archipenko to Severini - make clear the quality of this compendium of art prints from the twenties.

The printmaking workshop did not only produce these series and many individual sheets for the Bauhaus masters, it was equally available to the students for their own works. In addition, the printing workshop also accepted commissions from the outside, for instance for the printing of lithographs after works by Piet Mondrian and Alexander Rodchenko.

Also, the foundations for the future development of functional typography at the Bauhaus were laid with poster and typography designs for various events and publications at the school. This included the Bauhaus postcards, which found wide distribution as original graphic miniatures and which, in their combination of typeface and image, were to become an important advertising medium for the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus favoured the use of sans serif fonts which was frowned upon heavily by most of Germany which preferred a heavier more complicated gothic font. This font which looked older and more formal had been used traditionally in German printing, but was difficult to read, a trait that some Bauhaus teachers disliked. This led Moholy- Nagy, to create a font design and theory on fonts and formatting which was published in the Bauhaus book Staatlicles Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923, a book on typesetting and typography of the Bauhaus.

"Typography is an instrument of communication. It must communicate clearly in the most urgent form. Clarity must be emphasized because, in comparison with prehistoric pictographs, it is the essence of script. Our intellectual attitude to the world is individually precise (this individual precision is today changing to collective precision), as opposed to the old individually and later collectively amorphous forms. Therefore above all, unambiguous clarity in all typography. Legibility communication must never be allowed to suffer for an aesthetic code adopted in advance. "

It was this thought that ,that inspired the simpler less formal and imposing fonts of the Bauhaus, and those fonts that irritated most of Germany. However, the German public responded even less favourably to the ideas of Herbert Bayer, who held some even more radical views on typography, none of which were looked upon favourably by much of Germany, although some of his ideas make a lot of sense.

Baeyer disliked the use of serifs, the small lines that extend off of letters, like in the font Times, or Times New Roman, he found them wasteful and unnecessary, Germany at the time favoured the serif, and the more complicated gothic fonts, Bayer employed these sans serif fonts in his work for the Bauhaus and his outside commissions, but the Bauhaus using this type of font was not new, or solely supported by Bayer, but some of his other ideas caused more trouble:
"Why should we write and print in two alphabets? Both a large sign and a small sign are not necessary to identify a single sound. We do not speak in a capital A and a small a. a single alphabet gives us practically the same result as the mixture of upper and lower case letters, and at the same time is less of a burden on all who write." (Bauhaus 1919-1928 )

He argued that once everyone got used to using all single case, things would be easier, typing would be easier to master and faster to carry out since there would be no need to use the shift key, by this typewriters would be easier and cheaper to make since only one case would be needed. He also discussed the possibility that commercial printing would also be cheaper since typesetters only would have to worry about a single size, and that things would take up less space saving paper and money, and in 1925 the Bauhaus stopped using capital letters in their printings. On some levels these arguments make sense, and if people could begin to learn to read/write without the uppercase letters things would eventually be simplified, but the amount of change that that would require is enormous, just trying to break the habits of people who had already learned to write would take a tremendous amount of time and energy and would be met with heavy opposition by almost everyone.

The German public and German officials disliked the use of sans serif fonts by the Bauhaus, taking it as another break from tradition by a group that was already to far out for their liking. Their irritation at that was surpassed by their outrage at the Bauhaus decision to stop using capital letters. Attempting to change this in a society that strongly values tradition, was not taken well, or looked upon favourably, but it was this type of radical departure that helped to define the Bauhaus, and part of what made its effects lasting .
The Bauhaus for all of its accomplishments in various areas did not have as profound effect on typography as it did elsewhere , but the ideas that they put forth were and are worth consideration, the chances taken in the name of experimentation show their commitment to improving things and the true desire to accomplish their objectives, to bring together all aspects of art into a related whole, of which typography was of course a part. And although they may not be remembered for their typography, the Bauhaus will not soon be forgotten for their willingness to experiment, and the results those experiments achieved.