Signs in airports The Bauhaus’s influence on typography and graphics was vast, transforming, for example, the advertising and branding of postwar corporate America. One of its most pervasive effects is in the signs that guide us around unfamiliar places like airports: the best of them use clear sans serif fonts, symbols that are graphically simplified but still informative and an underlying geometric order. All descend fromthe Bauhaus, usually by way of the influential Ulm School of Design, which was founded on Bauhaus lines in 1953.

Photograph: Alamy