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1995 AIGA MEDAL
Ladislav Sutnar was a progenitor of the current practice of
information graphics, the lighter of a torch that is carried today
by Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman, among others. For a wide
range of American businesses, Sutnar developed graphic systems that
clarified vast amounts of complex information, transforming
business data into digestible units. He was the man responsible for
putting the parentheses around American telephone area-code numbers
when they were first introduced.
The English author Anthony Trollope, who held a day job as a
postal employee, is not remembered for “designing” the British
postal box in 1852. Likewise, Sutnar has not been credited for the
American area code, which was so integral to the design of the new
calling system that is was instantly adopted into the language. The
functional typography and iconography the he developed as part of
various design programs for the Bell System in the late 1950s and
early '60s made public access to both emergency and normal services
considerably easier, while giving America's telecommunications
monopoly a distinctive graphic identity. Yet the Bell System denied
him credit, considering graphic designers as transparent as the
functional graphics they designed. Nonetheless, Sutnar's unheralded
contributions to information architecture remain milestones, not
only of graphic design history but of design for the public
good.
As impersonal as the area-code design might appear, the
parentheses were actually among Sutnar's signature devices, one of
many he used to distinguish and highlight information. As the art
director, from 1941 to 1960, of F.W. Dodge's Sweet's Catalog
Service, America's leading distributor and producer of trade and
manufacturing catalogues, Sutnar developed various typographic and
iconographic navigational devices that allowed users to efficiently
traverse seas of data. His icons are analogous to the friendly
computer symbols used today.
In addition to grid and tab systems, Sutnar made common
punctuation, such as commas, colons and exclamation points, into
linguistic traffic signs by enlarging and repeating them. Although
he professed universality, he nevertheless possessed a graphic
personality that was so distinctive from others practicing the
International Style that his work did not even require a credit
line, although he almost always took one.
“The lack of discipline in our present-day urban industrial
environment has produced a visual condition, characterized by
clutter, confusion and chaos,” wrote Allon Shoener, the curator of
the exhibition Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action,
which originated at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in
1961. “There is an urgent need for communication based upon
precision and clarity. This is the area in which Ladislav Sutnar
excels.”
Like Jan Tschichold, Sutnar synthesized European avant-gardisms,
which he said “provided the base for further extension of new
design vocabulary and new design means,” into a functional
commercial lexicon that eschewed formalistic rules or art for art's
sake. While he modified aspects of the New Typography, he did not
compromise its integrity in the same way that elements of Swiss
Neue Grafik became mediocre through mindless usage over time. “He
made Constructivism playful and used geometry to create the
dynamics of organization,” says Noel Martin, who was a member of
Sutnar's small circle of friends in the late 1950s.
Consistency reigned within an established framework, such as
limited type and color choices as well as strict layout
preferences, but within those parameters a variety of options
existed in relation to different kinds of projects, including
catalogs, books, magazines, and exhibitions.
Although Sutnar's spoken English was fettered by a heavy Czech
accent and marred by grammatical deficiencies, he was nevertheless
a prolific writer who articulated his professional standards in
essays and books that were both philosophical and practical.
Visual Design in Action argues for future advances in
graphic design and defines design in relation to a variety of
dynamic methodologies. It is arguably the most intellectually
stimulating Modern design book since Tschichold's Die Neue
Typographic.
Sutnar's difficulties with spoken English as a second language
do much to explain why his design was so straightforward. Indeed,
information of the kind presented in the Seet's catalogs, which
included everything from plumbing supplies to hydroelectric
generators, were the equivalent of second or even third languages
to many of its users. So if verbal or written language could not
efficiently communicate or mediate information in the age of mass
production, then, Sutnar reasoned, visual language needed to be
more direct.
One of his favorite comments was: “Without efficient typography,
the jet plane pilot cannot read his instrument panel fast enough to
survive. [So] new means had to come to meet the quickening tempo of
industry. Graphic design was forced to develop higher standards of
performance to speed up the transmission of information. [And] the
watchword of today is 'faster, faster'; produce faster, distribute
faster, communicate faster.”
Even before the advent of the Information Age, there was
information—masses of it, begging to be organized into accessible
and retrievable packages. In the 1930s American industry made an
attempt to introduce strict design systems to business, but the
Great Depression demanded that the focus turn to retooling
factories and improving products, which spawned a new breed of
professional: the industrial designer. In Europe, the prototypical
industrial designer had already established himself, and the
graphic design arm of the Modern movement was already concerned
with access to information as a function of making the world a
better place. The mission to modernize antiquated aspects of
European life led directly to efficient communications expressed
through typographic purity. Sutnar led the charge in Czechoslovakia
years before emigrating to the United States.
In the early 1920s Sutnar, who was born in Pilsen in 1897 and
finished his studies concurrently at the Prague School of
Decorative Arts, Charles University and Czech Technical University,
was already a devout Modernist. In 1923 he was made a professor of
design at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague. From 1932 to
1946 he was its director, and kept the title even in absentia after
emigrating to the United States in 1939. Le Corbusier's purism
influenced his exhibition design, and he developed his own
personality as a textile, product, glassware, porcelain and
educational toy designer. From 1929 to 1939 he was art editor on
the staff of Prague's largest publishing house, Drustevní Prace
(Cooperative Works), where he created playful photomontage covers
that are still remarkably fresh today. For magazines like the
Socialist arts journal Zijeme (We Live) and V¥ytvarnÈ
snahy (Fine Arts Endeavors) and jackets for books by Upton
Sinclair and George Bernard Shaw, Sutnar's asymmetrical type and
image compositions offered the reader additional levels of visual
experience.
Overshadowed by two contemporaries, El Lissitsky and
Moholy-Nagy, Sutnar is a relatively unsung leader of Modern
objective typography. Yet he was a household name in Prague. “To be
a Sutnar in Czechoslovakia was to be a prince,” recalls his younger
son Radoslav Sutnar, who today is a real estate developer and
consultant in Los Angeles. In Prague they lived in a classically
modern home in Baba, a residential district known for its
avant-garde artists. As evidence of his father's fame, a 1934
exhibition (which is still intact) entitled Ladislav Sutnar and
the New Typography earned considerable praise.
By 1938 Sutnar had earned many international awards, including a
silver medal at the 1925 International Exhibition in Paris; a gold
medal at the World Exhibition, Barcelona, 1929; the Grand Prix,
Trienniale, Milan, 1936; and fourteen Grand Prix and gold medals at
the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. Sutnar was then awarded
a commission to design the Czech exhibition at the 1939 New York
World's Fair: “The World of Tomorrow.” However, Hitler's
partitioning of Czechoslovakia forced the pavilion to open with
material already on hand. Sutnar, who was sent to New York by the
German government to liquidate the exhibit and bring its treasures
back to occupied Czechoslovakia, decided not to return home. And
since he did not send the materials back to German authorities, he
was suspended by the Education Ministry, thereby becoming a marked
man. So in 1939, while his wife and two sons remained in Prague, he
established residence on 52nd Street in the heart of New York's
Jazz district.
During his first year in New York Sutnar worked briefly with
Norman Bel Geddes, one of the key designers of the World's Fair,
and later at Coty cosmetics for Grover Whalen, the former World's
Fair president. He also worked for the Czech government in exile,
which allotted him some funds for unspecified purposes. He renewed
his contacts with other émigré designers, such as the architects
Serge Chermayeff, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius and graphiste
Herbert Matter. Through John Heduk, who founded the School of
Architecture at Columbia University, he was a frequent guest at
dinners for the Congress of International Modern Architecture,
where he met the director of information research for Sweet's
Catalog Service, K. (Knud) Löndberg-Holm, who instantly arranged
for Sutnar to become his art director.
It is said that Löndberg-Holm was the other half of Sutnar's
brain when it came to information. They were the Rogers and
Hammerstein of information design. Together they composed and wrote
Catalog Design (1944) and Catalog Design Progress
(1950). Löndberg-Holm introduced a variety of systematic departures
in catalog design, while Sutnar fine-tuned those models to show how
complex information could be organized and retrieved.
Sweet's Catalog Service was a facilitator for countless trade
and manufacturing publications that were collected in huge binders
and distributed to businesses throughout the United States. Before
Sutnar began its major redesign around 1941, the only
organizational device was the overall binder. Löndberg-Holm had
convinced Chauncey Williams, the president of F.W. Dodge, to order
an entire reevaluation, from the logo (which Sutnar transformed
from a nineteenth-century swashed word, Sweets, to a bold “S”
dropped out of a black circle), to the fundamental structure of the
binder (including the introduction of tabular aids), to the
redesign of individual catalogues (some of which were designed by
Sweet's in-house art department under Sutnar's direction). Together
they introduced the three-way index system (by company name,
production service and trade name) to facilitate information
retrieval.
Perhaps the most significant of Sutnar's innovations was the use
of spreads. He was one of the first designers to design double
spreads rather than single pages. A casual perusal of Sutnar's
designs for everything from catalogues to brochures form 1941 on,
with the logical exception of covers, reveals a preponderance of
spreads, on which his signature navigational devices force the
viewer to go from one level of information to the next. Through
spreads, Sutnar was able to inject visual excitement into even the
most routine material without impinging upon accessibility.
For almost twenty years Sutnar had an arrangement whereby he
worked for Sweet's in the morning and did freelance in the
afternoon. At first he worked out of a small studio; next he opened
an office near Wall Street originally called Sutnar, Flint and
Hall. Flint sold ads to newspapers, and Thelma Hall, whom Sutnar
had met at Sweet's, ran the studio. After a year Flint left, so the
office was moved and renamed Sutnar + Hall. Sutnar relied on Hall
for everything. While he set the style, she would explain it to the
board people.
Philip Pearlstein, the realist painter, was Sutnar's assistant
for many years. He remembers that Sutnar loved taking things apart
to find the right organizing structure and reconstruct it. In this
sense he referred to himself as a Constructivist. One of Sutnar's
favorite organizational tropes was precise indexing to both avoid
misunderstanding and limit unnecessary reading time. By using small
images his indices were akin to a visual Dewey Decimal system.
However, even though the goal was to save time, Sutnar often
introduced design ideas to engender “visual interest”—such as
italics as body text—that were initially difficult to navigate, and
therefore time consuming. Sutnar also had the desire to introduce
aesthetics into everyday life. “If the catalogue looked good, the
user might think about why it looked good,” reports Pearlstein,
“which in addition to being utopian idealism was also a
snobbishness on his part.”
Sutnar was a snob when it came to design. Like other pioneer
Modernists, he believed that he had the right answers and everyone
else was wrong. His fundamental thesis is found in these words:
“Good visual design is serious in purpose. Its aim is not to attain
popular success by going back to the nostalgia of the past, or by
sinking to the infantile level of a mythical public taste. It
aspires to uplift the public to an expert design level. To inspire
improvement and progress demands that the designer perform to the
fullest limits of his ability. The designer must think first, work
later.”
Radoslav Sutnar recalls that his father came on strong: “Some
clients loved him; others thought he was crazy. In fact, people in
the United States were often skeptical of the radical ideas he
proposed. He was just so methodical, he had to do things his own
way. When he hit it right, it was a thousand percent; when he did
it wrong, it was curiously crude.”
While the term “crude” doesn't jive with the meticulous
typography that was Sutnar's recognized trademark, judging from the
evidence in his archive at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum in New York, he did produce a large amount of aesthetically
questionable material. Whether it was the result of too many
compromises or just poor judgment, there is a curious pattern to
his crudity. It usually occurred when he used excessively large
type or oversimplified an information graphic. Even so, his most
flawed work was on a higher plane than most.
As he once wrote, “Design is evaluated as a process culminating
in an entity which intensifies comprehension,” and clients
benefited from his unswerving commitment to this idea. In addition
to the Bell System program, which was only partially instituted, he
developed Modern systems for a variety of businesses, most notably
advertising and identity campaign for Vera scarves (which despite
the mass market appeal of the product, were masterpieces of
Constructivist sophistication); graphic and environmental systems
for Carr's shopping plaza in New Jersey (for whom he developed a
lexicon of icons, pictographs and glyphs which were the
quintessential application of rapid identifiers and symbols); and
identity, advertisements and exhibitions for Addo-X, a Swedish
business machine company that was competing with Olivetti in the
United States. The Addo-X identity was predicated on geometric
forms and is rooted in graphics that are beguilingly simple and
unmistakably unique (a bold sans serif iconographic X exhibited
power that could be likened to the cross and swastika).
Despite such milestones, Sutnar's client base was eroding by the
early 1960s. He lost his job with Sweet's because the systems in
place obviated the need for a full-time art director and
information research department. At a particularly difficult time,
Sutnar's friends banded together to inform the business community
about his work. The result was the traveling exhibition
Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action, which was
curated by Allon Schoener but meticulously designed by Sutnar
himself. The exhibition was the basis for the book of the same
name, which, because he could not find a publisher who would pay
the high production costs, Sutnar financed out of his own pocket
and sold for the hefty price of $15. Sutnar had previously edited
Design for Point of Sale (1952) and Package
Design (1953), which showcased exemplary work by others, but
Visual Design in Action featured his own work as a model
on which to base contemporary design. Sales were not very brisk,
although today the book is a rare treasure.
Through the 1960s commissions disappeared. Disheartened by the
lack of interest in his work, he turned his attention to painting
what he called “joy-art,” essentially a collection of geometrically
constructed nudes that resembled, though in fact prefigured,
paintings by Tom Wesselman. In the late '60s and early '70s he
continued to haunt the New York Art Director's Club, where a
younger generation was relatively oblivious to his achievements. In
the mid-seventies he was diagnosed with cancer and died in
1976.
Sutnar left a legacy of work and writing that prove his vitality
as a designer and his passion for design. Many designers can claim
to have one or more pieces in the pantheon, but few can claim, as
Sutnar can, that these works are as viable today as they were when
first conceived. Many design students—knowingly or not—have
borrowed and applied his signature graphics to a post-Modern style.
Sutnar, however, would loathe being appreciated as a nostalgic
figure. “There is just one lesson from the past that should be
learned for the benefit of the present,” he wrote in 1959, as if
preempting this kind of superficial epitaph. “It is that
painstaking, refined craftsmanship appears to be dying out.”
Copyright 1997 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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