Unjustified text and the zero hour

This is the text of a lecture given at the conference on 'Design & reconstruction in postwar Europe', held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, in January 1994. It is an attempt to locate a general principle of design - unjustified setting of text - in a precise historical context. The discussion focusses on experiments and debates over unjustified text in the years around 1945, by designers in Switzerland, Britain, and the Netherlands.