Ladislav Sutnar
Encyclopedia
Ladislav Sutnar was a graphic designer from Pilsen
, Czechoslovakia
(in then western Bohemia) who was a pioneer of information design
and information architecture
. Although he is uncredited, his contributions to business organization benefited society, which included creating a user-friendly telephone directory by implementing area codes. He received design commissions from a variety of employers, including McGraw-Hill, IBM, and the United Nations. He also worked as art director for Sweet's Catalog Service for almost twenty years. Sutnar held many one-man exhibitions, and his work is on permanent display in MoMA
. He is best known for his books, including Controlled Visual Flow: Shape, Line and Color, Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling, and Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes. Sutnar was a master of exhibition design, typography, advertising, posters, magazine and book design.
, architecture at Charles University, and mathematics at the Czech Technical University. Post graduation, Sutnar worked on wooden toys, puppets, costumes, and stage design. Also, he contributed to exhibition design as well as teaching and the design of magazines, books, porcelain products and textiles. He taught at the State School of Graphic Arts, Prague, from 1923-36. In Europe, he gained recognition for typography and exhibition design.
While still in Prague, Sutnar was an Artel Cooperative member. Other designers for Artel included Vlastislav Hofman
and Rudolf Stockar. The Artel Cooperative consisted of designers from Czechoslovakia who crafted furniture and held workshops under the Wiener Werkstätte
's principles of art accessibility. Medium included ceramics, textiles, carpets, furniture, and metal aiming to visually improve the experiences of daily life. The organization came to an end in 1924.
In 1927, Sutnar became the head of publication design for a large publisher in Prague. He was made director of the State School of Graphic Arts beginning in 1932. Sutnar continued his work in exhibition design and received a Gold Medal at the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition Sutnar was also an art director of a book publisher and editor of an architectural magazine.
Sutnar was brought to the United States to design the exhibition for Czechoslovakia at the New York World Fair in 1939. Due to its cancellation, he chose to settle in New York leaving his family behind in Praque as Nazi control continued there.
In 1941, he became art director of F.W. Dodge's Sweet’s Catalog Service from 1941 until 1960 where he led the development of information design
along with Knud Lönberg-Holm. The company produced and distributed trade and manufacturing catalogues. Sutnar implemented both typographic and iconographic characters that enabled viewers to quickly and successfully navigate through an overwhelming amount of information. He did this by making use of grids, tabs, icons, and symbols. Sutnar and Holm published New Patterns in Product Information in 1944. Their reductive approach aimed for clarity and simplicity for all users with "active design elements".
At the same time, he added punctuation into traffic signs in the United States. He continued his typographic design for advertising and corporations as he was art director for Theatre Arts magazine for ten years. He also created trends in glassware and flatware products.
Sutnar was one of the first designers to actively practice the field of information design. His work was based on rationality and the process of displaying massive amounts of information in a concise and organized way to benefit the general viewer. Typography and a limited color palette was stressed in his work. He often used punctuation symbols to help organize information, but his signature creation was the idea to place parentheses around the area codes in telephone books. While serving as art director for Sweet's Catalog Services, he created information graphics and catalog layouts for a wide range of manufactured items. He was heavily influenced by the ideas of Modernism and his work was well structured.
, Sutnar's work had a reduction to primary colors, straight lines, and an overall harmony of irregular text alignment. His strong use of diagonal elements, typography and imagery more strongly conveys his design style to be classified as Constructivism
. Space is divided into white and black areas and consist of elements with symbolism. Similar to Jan Tschichold
's work and Modern typography, his style was limited to type and color within strict layouts. More strongly, his work connected with the Bauhaus
fundamentals. His work is simple but suggests motion with vivid colors and directional patterns.
.
His racy Strip Street compilation has relatively been forgotten. He wrote an essay to accompany these works. "In these disturbed times of cool and alienated society," he wrote, "if the paintings can inject the feeling, the mission is accomplished." An influence of Pop is notable despite Sutnar's dislike of Pop and Op Art.
Pilsen
Plzeň, or Pilsen is a city in western Bohemia in the Czech Republic. It is the capital of the Plzeň Region and the fourth most populous city in the Czech Republic. It is located about 90 km west of Prague at the confluence of four rivers—the Radbuza, the Mže, the Úhlava, and the Úslava—which...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
(in then western Bohemia) who was a pioneer of information design
Information design
Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. Where the data is complex or unstructured, a visual representation can express its meaning more clearly to the viewer....
and information architecture
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming,...
. Although he is uncredited, his contributions to business organization benefited society, which included creating a user-friendly telephone directory by implementing area codes. He received design commissions from a variety of employers, including McGraw-Hill, IBM, and the United Nations. He also worked as art director for Sweet's Catalog Service for almost twenty years. Sutnar held many one-man exhibitions, and his work is on permanent display in MoMA
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
. He is best known for his books, including Controlled Visual Flow: Shape, Line and Color, Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling, and Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes. Sutnar was a master of exhibition design, typography, advertising, posters, magazine and book design.
Life
Sutnar studied painting at the School of Applied Arts in PraguePrague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, architecture at Charles University, and mathematics at the Czech Technical University. Post graduation, Sutnar worked on wooden toys, puppets, costumes, and stage design. Also, he contributed to exhibition design as well as teaching and the design of magazines, books, porcelain products and textiles. He taught at the State School of Graphic Arts, Prague, from 1923-36. In Europe, he gained recognition for typography and exhibition design.
While still in Prague, Sutnar was an Artel Cooperative member. Other designers for Artel included Vlastislav Hofman
Vlastislav Hofman
Vlastislav Hofman was a Czech artist and architect. Though he was a painter, set designer, graphic artist, furniture designer, and author, Hofman is best known as an architect strongly influenced by Cubism....
and Rudolf Stockar. The Artel Cooperative consisted of designers from Czechoslovakia who crafted furniture and held workshops under the Wiener Werkstätte
Wiener Werkstätte
Established in 1903, the Wiener Werkstätte was a production community of visual artists. The workshop brought together architects, artists and designers whose first commitment was to design art which would be accessible to everyone...
's principles of art accessibility. Medium included ceramics, textiles, carpets, furniture, and metal aiming to visually improve the experiences of daily life. The organization came to an end in 1924.
In 1927, Sutnar became the head of publication design for a large publisher in Prague. He was made director of the State School of Graphic Arts beginning in 1932. Sutnar continued his work in exhibition design and received a Gold Medal at the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition Sutnar was also an art director of a book publisher and editor of an architectural magazine.
Sutnar was brought to the United States to design the exhibition for Czechoslovakia at the New York World Fair in 1939. Due to its cancellation, he chose to settle in New York leaving his family behind in Praque as Nazi control continued there.
In 1941, he became art director of F.W. Dodge's Sweet’s Catalog Service from 1941 until 1960 where he led the development of information design
Information design
Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. Where the data is complex or unstructured, a visual representation can express its meaning more clearly to the viewer....
along with Knud Lönberg-Holm. The company produced and distributed trade and manufacturing catalogues. Sutnar implemented both typographic and iconographic characters that enabled viewers to quickly and successfully navigate through an overwhelming amount of information. He did this by making use of grids, tabs, icons, and symbols. Sutnar and Holm published New Patterns in Product Information in 1944. Their reductive approach aimed for clarity and simplicity for all users with "active design elements".
At the same time, he added punctuation into traffic signs in the United States. He continued his typographic design for advertising and corporations as he was art director for Theatre Arts magazine for ten years. He also created trends in glassware and flatware products.
Information graphics
Sutnar was not credited for the implementation of parentheses around the American area code for Bell System (late 1950s-early 1960s). This addition allowed much easier access to normal and emergency services. The reason for lack of credit lies in the fact that Bell System considered "graphic designers as transparent as the function graphics they designed." Sutnar used parentheses in his own work to highlight and distinguish information. Sutnar himself said that in absence of these organizational methods and simplified legibility it makes everyday activities much more difficult to accomplish. Graphic design was responding to the growing pace of the information standards and the need to communicate faster.Sutnar was one of the first designers to actively practice the field of information design. His work was based on rationality and the process of displaying massive amounts of information in a concise and organized way to benefit the general viewer. Typography and a limited color palette was stressed in his work. He often used punctuation symbols to help organize information, but his signature creation was the idea to place parentheses around the area codes in telephone books. While serving as art director for Sweet's Catalog Services, he created information graphics and catalog layouts for a wide range of manufactured items. He was heavily influenced by the ideas of Modernism and his work was well structured.
Styles & Design
Borrowing from the principles of De StijlDe Stijl
De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
, Sutnar's work had a reduction to primary colors, straight lines, and an overall harmony of irregular text alignment. His strong use of diagonal elements, typography and imagery more strongly conveys his design style to be classified as Constructivism
Constructivism
Constructivism may refer to:* Constructivist epistemology, the philosophical view* Constructivism in international relations* Constructivism , a philosophical view on mathematical proofs and existence of mathematical objects...
. Space is divided into white and black areas and consist of elements with symbolism. Similar to Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.-Life:Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy...
's work and Modern typography, his style was limited to type and color within strict layouts. More strongly, his work connected with the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
fundamentals. His work is simple but suggests motion with vivid colors and directional patterns.
- Book design
- Sutnar designed the book jacket for George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
's Obraceni Kapitana Brassbounda in 1932. - Sutnar's cover of Nejmenší dům (The Smallest House) uses only the colors black, white and red and a diagonal title.
- Sutnar designed the book jacket for George Bernard Shaw
- Poster design
- Visit the Modern Textile Exhibition (1930) demonstrated the "ability of written characters to focus attention without the help of a pictorial image" with a rectangular arrangement and different text sizes based on a hierarchy of information.
- Toy design
- Starting in 1924, Sutnar designed toys consisting of simple geometric structures of animals and puppets. He attempted to introduce modern aesthetics into children's toys by developing a building kit that consisted of sawtooth roofs, cones, and pieces in the colors of red, blue, and white (this remained a prototype). He also wrote a children's book on the future of traffic in Transport: Next Half Century. Sutnar created art-oriented toys, i.e. "Apisonadora" (construction vehicle).
Strip Street
The 1960s proved to be a difficult time for the designer as he turned to publishing Strip Street (1963). It was an album of 12 erotic silk-screen prints. Sutnar organized two New York gallery exhibitions of his nudes, In Pursuit of Venus (1966) and Venus: Joy-Art (1969). These works outside of his norm still included Sutnar's hierarchical design approach as a father of modern information design. The term "posters without words" refers to Sutnar's distinct poster-like design that characterizes the individual prints of this series. Sutnar's paintings are reproduced in a 392-page monographMonograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
.
His racy Strip Street compilation has relatively been forgotten. He wrote an essay to accompany these works. "In these disturbed times of cool and alienated society," he wrote, "if the paintings can inject the feeling, the mission is accomplished." An influence of Pop is notable despite Sutnar's dislike of Pop and Op Art.
Published Books
- Catalog Design was a handbook by Sutnar in 1944 for trade catalogs using constructivist principles.
- Catalog Design Progress by Sutnar and Holm solved sales and advertising problems by focusing on product information and "living standards" of all forms of information design. It was based on the idea that logical compositions would enable quick access to common information. Composed of four parts, it begins with patterns influenced by industrialization, such as street patterns and transportation. Part two features visual features of design, typography, pictures, charts, and covers. Color, shape, and size are used as tools to direct eye movement. Part three directs structural or layout features, i.e., page, catalog, and file organization. The last part is devoted to fundamental design principles: form and flow.
- Design for Point of Sale (1952) was a survey of contemporary methods of in-store display.
- Package Design: the Force of Visual Selling (1953)
- Visual Design in Action (1961) argues for future advances in graphic design and defines design. This Modern design book has been compared to Tschichold's Die Neue Typographic." It was an exhibition of his work and a self-funded book.
Influence/Legacy
Although way before his time, Sutnar's methods of conveying information in a manner that evoked attention can be linked to the navigational aids of web design.See also
- ConstructivismConstructivism (art)Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...
- List of AIGA medalists
- Category:AIGA Medalists
- List of Eye magazine issues
- Category:Czech graphic artists
- Category:Communication design
- Category:Recipients of Medal of Merit (Czech Republic)
- Jan TschicholdJan TschicholdJan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.-Life:Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy...
Further reading
- Visual design in action: principles, purposes. New York: Hastings House, 1961. Unpaged, illustrated (color and black and white), 31.5 X 21.5 cm.
- "Commercial Symbols in Architecture." Architectural Record 120 (September 1956): 256-261.
- "How important is the surface to design?" Print 13 (January-February 1959): 29.
- "Ladislav Sutnar: Ecology and the needs for visual design." Idea 21 (March 1973): 58-63.
- Iva Janáková and Steven Heller (Eds.). Ladislav Sutnar. Prague, 2003.
- Ladislav Sutnar & Löndberg-Holm. Catalog Design. (1944).
- Ladislav Sutnar. Visual Design in Action: principles, purposes. (1961)
- Transport: Next Half Century. New York: Canterbury Printing Co. 1950. Unpaged, illustrated (color), 22.5 X 28.5 cm.
- Fotografie vidi povrch (Photography Sees the Surface) by Ladislav Sutnar and Jaromír Funke. Publisher Michigan Slavic Publications, 2004. ISBN 0930042921, 9780930042929
- Sutnar, Ladislav: DESIGN EXHIBITION [from January10 to February 28, 1947]. NYC: The Composing Room/A-D Gallery, 1947. http://www.modernism101.com/sutnar_ad_gallery.php
- Sutnar, Ladislav and K. Lönberg-Holm: CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS: ADVANCING STANDARDS IN VISUAL COMMUNICATION. New York: Sweet’s Catalog Service, 1950. http://www.modernism101.com/sutnar_catalog_design_1950.php
- Sutnar, Ladislav: SHAPE, LINE AND COLOR. New York: Marquardt & Company Fine Papers, 1945 [Design and Paper No. 19]. http://www.modernism101.com/sutnar_shape_line_color.php
- Dirksen, Charles and Hovde, Howard T. Journal of Marketing; Jul 1951, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p117-118, 2p. This article reviews the book "Catalog Design Progress," by K. Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar.
- Sutnar, Ladislav. Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling. 128 pp., 545 ill. New York: Arts, Inc., 1953. $9.75.
- Dirksen, Charles and Hovde, Howard T. Journal of Marketing; Jul 1951, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p117-118, 2p. This article reviews the book "Catalog Design Progress," by K. Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar