Revue Faire – To look at things #34

The reissue of issue 34 of the critical graphic design journal: a questioning of the criterion of “beauty” applied to typography and the challenges of the “Most Beautiful Swiss Books” award. It was during the century of Enlightenment that aesthetics became autonomous, that the Beautiful separated itself from the Good and the Useful, like a form of free access to meaning, to truth. And one might well ask if, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, design, from dessin to dessein, has not to some extent taken up the torch of the applied techniques of the former regime of the art of doing and making, and of beauty. What has become of the term “beautiful” as applied to typography, understood as the art of shaping books, since 1943 and the establishment of the “Most Beautiful Swiss Books” award under the influence of the famous Jan Tschichold?