Three founders, a borrowed classroom and a concrete campus, 1953 to 1955.

The Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, known as the HfG Ulm and in English as the Ulm School of Design, was a design college in the southern German city of Ulm. Wikipedia says it was founded in 1953 by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill, with Bill as its rector. Dezeen, reporting on 26 November 2012, names the same three founders, and Wallpaper*, writing on 20 October 2016, describes Bill as working alongside his co-founders Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher.

The school grew out of an existing institution in the city. Eye magazine, reviewing Markus Rathgeb’s book on Aicher in spring 2007, says Aicher and Inge Scholl had worked together at Ulm’s adult education school, the Volkshochschule, and that Aicher’s lecture posters for it used a vertical double-square format with geometric divisions and lettering in Futura Bold. The same review says the Swiss artist and designer Max Bill became head of the more radical institution that Aicher and his friends were planning. English Wikipedia says teaching began on 3 August 1953 in rooms at the Volkshochschule, with former Bauhaus teachers Josef Albers, Johannes Itten and Walter Peterhans and the Bauhaus graduate Helene Nonné-Schmidt among the staff.

The school then built its own home. German Wikipedia says ground was broken on 8 September 1953 for a complex on the Oberer Kuhberg, a hill on the western side of Ulm, to designs by Bill, that the topping-out was celebrated on 5 July 1954, and that the teaching building was officially opened on 2 October 1955, with Walter Gropius giving the opening address. It describes a reinforced-concrete frame with generous workshops, a student residence and a canteen, and interiors and furniture laid out for flexible use. Wallpaper* also says Bill designed the school building, and Eye calls Bill the HfG’s architect and director at its opening in 1955.

Bill summed up the school’s scope in a phrase that Wallpaper* quoted in 2016: “From the coffee cup to the housing estate.” Wikipedia lists the departments as Product Design, Visual Communication, Industrialized Building, Information and Filmmaking, each entered after a shared one-year basic course. Wallpaper* said Bill and his co-founders favoured an interdisciplinary and systematic approach to design education, and Eye describes the resulting method, known as the Ulm Model, as drawing on studies such as cybernetics, systems theory, semiotics and information design, with tools that included checklists, the ordering of information into hierarchies and the grid.

Work for Braun and Lufthansa, 1955 to 1962.

The school’s name travelled through its work for companies. Dezeen reported in 2012 that the HfG was known for its collaboration with Braun in the 1950s, in which the newly hired designer Dieter Rams worked with teachers and students to develop the functional and economical style that became the company’s trademark. Wallpaper* captioned two pieces from that collaboration in its 2016 report: the D 55 flexible exhibition system by Otl Aicher, assisted by Hans Conrad, for Braun in 1955, and the SK 4 Phonosuper radio-phonograph by Hans Gugelot, with Aicher, Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Rams, for Braun in 1956.

The changes inside the school shaped this outside work. Wikipedia says Bill resigned as rector in 1956 after disagreements over teaching, that Tomás Maldonado took his place, and that Bill left the school in 1957. It says Bill’s departure led to the creation of “development groups” set up to work with industry, whose commissions included audio equipment for Braun, the corporate identity of Lufthansa and elevated trains for Hamburg’s railway. Wallpaper* quoted Maldonado describing the HfG as more like a community whose members shared the same intentions than a school for one special subject.

The Lufthansa project carried the school’s methods into an airline identity. Eye says Aicher led a group responsible for the complete house style of Lufthansa, from aircraft livery to luggage labels. Dezeen, reporting on 5 February 2018 when the airline changed its livery, said the yellow had been added in the sixties by Aicher and students from his Gruppe E5 at the HfG Ulm, and that his design system also redrew the crane logo and introduced lowercase Helvetica Bold as the airline’s typeface. The same article quoted the designer Golling dating the warmer yellow to 1962. Wallpaper* showed prototype on-board tableware for Lufthansa by Hans Roericht from the HfG-Archiv collection.

The school also published and exhibited its own work. Wikipedia says the HfG staged a major exhibition in 1958, five years after teaching began, and that the same year saw the launch of the school magazine ulm, published in German and English until the school closed. Another exhibition of class work was shown in Ulm and Stuttgart in 1963, then at Die Neue Sammlung in Munich and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. German Wikipedia says a new constitution came into force in 1962 with a single rector, and that the choice fell on Otl Aicher; Eye describes Aicher’s path at the school as co-founder, head of the Visual Communication department and, eventually, director.

A school that lasted fifteen years and a building that stayed.

Schools and cultural institutions carry identities that work differently from those of consumer brands. Many began with a crest, a seal or a formal Latin motto, the visual language of charters and certificates, and later added or swapped in a plain wordmark that sits more easily on a website, a banner or a tote bag. Others never had a crest at all and built their recognition on a single letter, a typeface or a set of initials.

The building often does as much work as any mark. A façade, an extension or a distinctive staircase becomes the image that photographers, students and visitors repeat, and a new wing can change how an institution is pictured for decades. Posters are a second, older surface: a steady programme of exhibition and event posters, set in a consistent grid or typeface, can define a place more clearly than its logo.

Exhibitions, catalogues, yearbooks, journals and reports extend that system into print, and each title is a chance to test the identity at a new scale. When reading these guides, look at the whole family of surfaces together: the mark, the building, the posters and the publications usually tell one story.

Closure in 1968 and an archive on the Kuhberg, dated.

The HfG Ulm closed in 1968. Dezeen wrote in 2012 that the school closed that year after fifteen years in operation. German Wikipedia says that in the course of 1968 some teachers were dismissed and classes were reduced because of the school’s financial position, that the regional parliament in Stuttgart approved a grant for 1969 on 18 July 1968 subject to conditions, and that when the conditions were not met in time the funds were frozen at the end of the year. It says the foundation that ran the school ended its operation on 31 December 1968.

The name continued in successor bodies. Dezeen said the school’s work went on through the Institut für Umweltplanung (IUP), which existed until 1972 to serve the remaining students, and, since 1988, the Internationales Forum für Gestaltung (IFG), the platform from which the HfG foundation operates. The article was prompted by the book HfG IUP IFG Ulm 1968–2008 by the Cologne-based writer René Spitz, who worked alongside Otl Aicher in the 1990s and chaired the IFG’s advisory board from 2004 to 2007.

The building outlasted the school. German Wikipedia says the University of Ulm used the former HfG buildings from 1972 to 2011, after which the Stiftung Hochschule für Gestaltung HfG Ulm renovated them as a centre for design. It says the city of Ulm founded the HfG-Archiv in the former buildings in 1987, on the initiative of former members of the school, that the archive became a department of Museum Ulm in 1993, and that a new permanent exhibition on the school’s history has been shown in its rooms since autumn 2013. Wallpaper* credited the HfG-Archiv and Ulmer Museum for many of the objects in The Ulm Model, an exhibition at the Raven Row gallery in London in 2016, which included student drawings, models and products from weighing machines to traffic lights and kitchenware.

For a design guide, the HfG Ulm shows an institution remembered through a method and a set of commissions rather than a single mark: Bill’s concrete building of 1955, the grid-based Ulm Model, Aicher’s Futura Bold posters and the Lufthansa house style, and a closure at the end of 1968. Compare Braun, whose products the school’s teachers and students helped shape, and the Design Council, another design institution in this collection. For this guide we use yellow, concrete grey and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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