The exchanges in 1946 between Max Bill and Jan Tschichold never go away. They combined typography, aesthetics, morality, politics, at a level of seriousness that is rare in any such debate between designers. (In a one sentence summary: Bill accused Tschichold of now practising a reactionary typography, with dangerous political echoes; Tschichold considered Bill’s typography to be artistic in a bad sense, and with a false elevation of machine production.) Recently, revising a text that I had written in the 1990s about the conditions for design in Europe after 1945, I had to check its publishing details again.

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