Book Illustration, World Geo-Graphic Atlas: A Composite of Man's Environment, World Annual Rainfall and Ocean Currents

Herbert Bayer is known primarily for his graphic design, although he worked in a variety of media including architecture, photography and sculpture. As director of print and advertising at the Bauhaus, Bayer developed an entirely lowercase sans serif font that was used for the majority of Bauhaus publications. He immigrated to America in the 1930s and continued to work in graphic design. In 1953, he designed the World Geo-Graphic Atlas in commemoration of the Container Corporation of America’s 25th anniversary. In this atlas, considered to be a classic example of 20th-century modernist book design, Bayer—through graphs, charts, symbols and maps—effectively organizes and illustrates a large amount of diverse information, such as weather patterns, census and commercial statistics, and transportation/communication systems. In this example, Bayer superimposes a series of curvilinear lines over a globe to show wind and weather currents.