# AEG Corporate Identity (AEGの企業アイデンティティ)

> Products, factory and printed matter all handed to one architect, so that a company looked as though a single hand had made it. The lettering, objects and buildings Behrens drew for AEG from 1907 became the prototype of corporate design.

- IndexStyle No.216 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/aeg-identity
- Kind: Style · Family: Modern Design Movements · Era: 1907-1914
- Mood: Trust, Technique, Futurity
- What this family collects: Organizations and theories formed early in the twentieth century to settle how art should relate to mass production, split between the workshop and the standardized type.

## Defining characteristics

- Company lettering drawn from geometry
- Products built as one family of forms
- A gabled front of steel and glass with the ornament taken off
- One hand visible from kettle to catalogue

## Best used for

- Aligning products, printed matter and buildings under one corporate standard
- Putting the design criteria for mass production into words a company can share

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: One typeface fixed as a standard, sizes and margins given as numbers
- Layout & structure: Products and advertising built on one grid and one dimensional system
- Material & texture: Standard industrial materials, with quality carried by the finish

## Colour

Read off the reference works below, so a direction rather than a fixed palette.

- Ground: #f1eeed
- The colour it is remembered by: #937e5e
- Text and outlines: #22231a

## What to avoid

Reading standardization as sameness, making everything one shape and skipping the argument about quality, which lands in dull mass production.

## Application checklist

Work through this before calling a piece an application of this style.

- [ ] Visible in the piece: Company lettering drawn from geometry
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Products built as one family of forms
- [ ] Visible in the piece: A gabled front of steel and glass with the ornament taken off
- [ ] Visible in the piece: One hand visible from kettle to catalogue
- [ ] The layout follows: Products and advertising built on one grid and one dimensional system
- [ ] The lettering follows: One typeface fixed as a standard, sizes and margins given as numbers
- [ ] The material and surface follow: Standard industrial materials, with quality carried by the finish
- [ ] The colour relation holds: #f1eeed as ground, #937e5e carrying the style, #22231a for text and outlines
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Bauhaus (バウハウス)** — Makes function and play coexist through the circle, triangle and square. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/bauhaus
- **Arts and Crafts (アーツ・アンド・クラフツ)** — Returns material and handwork to the center of design, joining every detail of daily life under one conviction. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/arts-and-crafts

## Compose it with something else

The dictionary can put this entry in a structural role and another in an accent role, and report where the two fight: https://indexstyle.org/compose?ids=aeg-identity+bauhaus

## Further study

- Peter Behrens
- Hermann Muthesius
- the standardization debate (Muthesius vs. van de Velde)

## Reference works

- Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory 1909 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AEG%20Turbinenhalle%20Fassade.jpg
- Weissenhof Estate 1927 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weissenhof%20Corbusier%2003%20cropped2.jpg
- Peter Behrens, AEG electric kettle 1909 (Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln) — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electric%20kettle%2C%20designed%20by%20Peter%20Behrens%2C%20AEG%2C%20Berlin%2C%201909%2C%20copper%2C%20rattan%2C%20wood%20-%20Museum%20f%C3%BCr%20Angewandte%20Kunst%20K%C3%B6ln%20-%20Cologne%2C%20Germany%20-%20DSC09630.jpg

## Source of record

- Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts and Crafts: beyond the UK — https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/arts-and-crafts-beyond-the-uk

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/aeg-identity
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/aeg-identity/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compare_styles, compose_styles, find_related_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)