Herbert Bayer was a graphic and exhibition designer, architect and landscape designer, photographer, painter. A great man who was a pioneer of modernism in European and American design. He apprenticed with the architect Schmidthammer in Linz, worked for Emanuel Margold and studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar (1921–23) under Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy. He designed bold typographic banknotes in 1923. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Bayer was placed in charge of typography and advertising. He advocated the use of sans serif typefaces, produced a geometric alphabet (1925), and proposed the abolition of capital letters.
Bayer set up a Berlin studio in 1928, was the art director of the German Vogue magazine and collaborated with Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Breuer on a Berlin exhibition of the Werkbund and the Workers Union. Bayer moved to New York for political reasons, as an art director for leading agencies during the war. He initiated and designed the 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at NY MoMA. In 1946 Bayer became a leading educator at the Aspen Institute. He was initiator of the Aspen Design Conferences and worked for CCA, later becoming chairman of its design department.