Bauhaus
The German art school look: pure circles, squares and triangles in red, yellow and blue, function-first geometry, zero decoration.
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What it is
Bauhaus was a German school (Weimar 1919, then Dessau, closed under political pressure in 1933) that fused fine art with craft and industry. Its visual signature: pure geometry (circle, square, triangle), the primary triad of red, yellow and blue plus black and white, flat shapes with no illusion of depth, bold diagonals, and geometric lowercase sans-serif type. Kandinsky famously mapped the colors to the shapes: blue circle, red square, yellow triangle.
Reach for it when you want work that feels intelligent, built, and timeless without being cold. It suits identity systems, poster series, education and culture brands, and anything that can carry big abstract shapes. Names to anchor a prompt: Herbert Bayer's universal alphabet, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's photomontage covers, Josef Albers on color interaction, Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs.
Gotcha: Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Swiss Style get used interchangeably and are not the same. De Stijl is strictly rectilinear with heavy black grid lines. Swiss Style is grid, photography, and Helvetica. Bauhaus is playful geometry with curves and diagonals, and it was a workshop philosophy first, a look second, so plenty of real Bauhaus output is muted grey and steel, not a primary-color party.
Ask AI for it
Design this in a Bauhaus style: compose it from pure geometric primitives (circles, half-circles, squares, right triangles) in flat fills with no gradients or shadows. Palette is red, yellow, blue, black, and off-white paper only. Use strong diagonals and overlapping shapes for tension, set headlines in a geometric sans (Futura style) in lowercase with tight tracking, and align type to the shape edges. Keep it flat, asymmetric, and structural.