by Steven Heller
‘Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.’ (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794).
Ask Paul Rand what is beauty and he will answer that ‘the separation of form and function, of concept and execution, in not likely to produce objects of aesthetical value.’ (Paul Rand, A Designer’s Art, 1985).
Then ask the same question to the Cranbrook Academy of Art students who created the ad hoc desktop publication Output (1992), and judge by the evidence they might answer that beauty is chaos born of found letters layered on top of random patterns and shapes. Those who value functional simplicity would argue that the Cranbrook student’s publication, like a toad’s warts, is ugly. The difference is that unlike the toad, the Cranbrook students have deliberately given themselves the warts.
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