You’ve very likely used something shaped by the Ulm School without knowing it. A pictogram in an airport, the signage system at a station, a cleanly lined kitchen appliance, a logo built on a grid. The Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, the Ulm School of Design, known as HfG Ulm, ran for just fifteen years, from 1953 to 1968, in a small city in southern Germany. Yet few institutions have left such a deep mark on how the objects and information around us are designed.
Born from the post-war years
The school grew from a very particular moment: Germany in ruins after the Second World War. Among its founders were Inge Scholl, sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, the young White Rose resisters executed by the Nazi regime, and the graphic designer Otl Aicher, whom she would marry. Together with the Swiss artist and architect Max Bill, a former Bauhaus student, they founded the school in 1953.
The idea behind it went beyond the academic. The aim was to train designers with a social conscience, able to help rebuild a democratic society through objects, buildings and communication made for people. Design, for them, was a responsibility.
From the Bauhaus to something else
At first HfG presented itself as heir to the Bauhaus, and Max Bill, its first rector and the architect of its building, embodied that continuity. But the school soon went its own way. Where the Bauhaus gave art and craft a central role, Ulm pursued a more scientific, methodical design: it taught sociology, information theory, ergonomics, semiotics. A designer wasn’t an artist decorating objects but a professional solving problems with method.
That tension between art and science led to fierce debate and, in the mid-1950s, Bill’s departure. The school passed to a group of younger teachers, Aicher among them, who would go on to lead it in the early 1960s. We set this against the Bauhaus in the Bauhaus and its design legacy.
Systems, not single objects
Ulm’s great contribution was thinking in systems. An appliance wasn’t a standalone object but part of a coherent product family. A visual identity wasn’t a logo but a set of rules, typefaces, colours and grids that could be applied to everything. Signage wasn’t a sign but a complete language.
That thinking fed into work with industry. Teachers and students collaborated with companies such as Braun, whose sober, functional product look is closely associated with the school, and with the airline Lufthansa, whose visual identity Aicher’s team revised.
The Munich 1972 pictograms
The most famous example of that approach came after the school had closed. In 1966 the organisers of the 1972 Munich Olympics asked Otl Aicher to design the Games’ entire visual identity. Aicher and his team developed around 180 pictograms for sports and services on a strict grid. They didn’t invent the pictogram, which had precedents such as the 1920s Isotype system and the 1964 Tokyo Games, but their clear, coherent, modular system became a model that still shapes signage today.
Closure and legacy
HfG closed in 1968, amid financial difficulties, internal tensions and disputes with the authorities that funded it. But its students and teachers spread around the world, taking the method with them. Its influence is visible today in product design, corporate identity, signage, information design and much of digital interface design, where grids, systems and functional clarity are the norm.
What Ulm teaches a home
A school of industrial design might seem to have little to do with the art we hang on our walls. But its lesson is surprisingly useful at home. Think in systems: let your pieces share a frame, a palette or a grid. Seek clarity: fewer elements, better ordered. And be wary of gratuitous ornament: every object, every picture included, should be there for a reason. We explore how functional design talks to art in art and modern graphic design.
The compositions of Bendíra’s Quiet forms, with their calm order and restrained palette, share something of that search for clarity.
Keep reading: Paul Klee: Symbols, Lines and Visual Rhythm, Photomontage in Editorial Art and Design and How to Choose Wall Art for a Dining Room.