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Bauhaus Art – The Provenance of Metro Style

Everyone knows what a Metro Style is, but not everyone knows where did it come from. All around the web we can find tons of design freebies that comprise all the awesomeness of this style. Metro was some sort of the response to those old-school designs. Created as a shell for mobile OS, due to its popularity and novity Metro found it’s way into millions of desktop PCs and some newly created websites.

Metro designers understood that people have already crossed the line where everyone needed skeuomorphic GUIs, no one needs them already. It’s pretty clear that interfaces had to make the next step in their evolution. Most innovative designers say that future stands for Metro.

Even Apple seems to drop skeuomorphism in it’s next OS version (even though they brought this real-life monster to the market) and make their interfaces flat. As you may have guessed Flat style is Metro’s stepbrother.

Anyway, here comes the question…where did Metro come from? It turned out that it’s creators drew inspiration from the German Modernist movement of 1920s and 1930s- the Bauhaus School.

Below we’ve features the works of those artists. If you look closer you will definitely find similarities with the Metro interface. We’ve chosen the works of most prominent artists of this school: Paul Klee, Le Corbusier, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Piet Mondrian & Wassily Kandinsky. Check them out.

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Paul Klee

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Le Corbusier

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Josef Albers

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Herbert Bayer

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Piet Mondrian

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Wassily Kandinsky

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