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Visual Communication, Vol. 6, No. 3, 281-304 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1470357207081001

An unbearable lightness?

Steve Rigley

Glasgow School of Art, UK, s.rigley{at}gsa.ac.uk

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'.

Key Words: aesthetics • beauty • classicism • Enlightenment • letterforms • modernism • postmodernism • taste • typography • ugliness


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