Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was an Austrian graphic designer.

He apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Viennese Darmstadt Artists Colony , he became interested in Walter Gropius's Bauhaus manifesto . When Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising. Bayer adopted an all-lowercase alphabet as the hallmark of all Bauhaus publications, and designed a custom geometric sans-serif font, universal.

In 1928, Bayer the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office. Ten years later, he settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts.

Bayer studied under Kandinsky and Maholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. He is well known for inventing Universal Type font and during his time at Bauhaus he was an against the use of serif fonts and encouraged conversion to an all lower-cased alphabet.

In 1959, he designed his "fonetik alfabet", a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs "ch", "sh", and "ng". An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.