An unbearable lightness?

Abstract

This article considers various notions of `beauty' and how these have informed the creative and critical processes of graphic design, specifically typography. The author considers how the Renaissance revival of Greek mathematics to support a `universal beauty' was gradually unpicked by Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Kant and Hume, and how this process has subsequently shaped modernist and postmodernist attitudes towards `beauty'. From our current vantage point it could be argued that `beauty' should now be considered a redundant concept; however, design schools and studios continue to make value judgements dividing the `beautiful' from the `ugly'. On what basis are these judgements made and are they still valid in a pluralistic society? Is it possible that we now have a new sensibility, a different notion of beauty? Reflecting upon important questions raised by the American designer and writer Steven Heller in his controversial essay `The Cult of the Ugly' in Eye magazine in 1993, the author proposes that 14 years on from the article, we can indeed witness a new aesthetic sensibility, shared but not universal, rooted in loss yet also `found'.