Herbert Bayer, painter, printmaker, graphic designer, landscape designer, and architect, was born in Haag, Austria on April 5, 1900. At nineteen years-of-age, Bayer apprenticed with the architect and designer Georg Schmidthamer in Linz, and produced his first typographic works. From 1921 Bayer worked at the Darmstadt Artists' Colony as assistant to the architect Josef Emanuel Margold. That same year Bayer enrolled in the Weimar Bauhaus, where he studied under Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy.

Bayer completed his training in 1925 and was then appointed head of the newly created workshop for print and advertising at the Dessau Bauhaus. In 1928 the artist left Bauhaus to focus more on his own artwork and moved to Berlin, where he worked as a graphic designer in advertising and as an artistic director of the advertising agency Studio Dorland. During his time in Berlin, Bayer also devoted his time to the design of exhibitions, painting and photography, and was art director of the Vogue magazine office in Berlin.

In 1938 Bayer emigrated to the United States, where he arranged the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928 at the Museum of Modern Art New York that same year. In 1946 he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a painter, graphic designer, architect and landscape designer. As an architect, he co-designed the Aspen Institute and restored the Wheeler Opera House. As a graphic designer, he created advertising posters for skiing that identified the sport with excitement and glamour.

Bayer worked as an artistic consultant for several companies including the Container Corporation of America and the Atlantic Richfield Company. He was also the design consultant for the Aspen Cultural Center and member of the art board for the information bureau of the United States of America.

In 1974, Herbert Bayer moved to Montecito, California, where he died on September 30, 1985.

Herbert Bayer received numerous awards and honors, and his work is represented in the collections of the Denver Art Museum; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies at the Aspen Institute opened in 2022.