The modern movement did not gain an early foothold in the United States. When the fabled 1913 Armory Show introduced modernism to America, it generated a storm of protest and provoked public rejection of modern art and design. Modernist European design did not become a significant influence in America until the 1930s. As the billboards in a Walker Evans (1903–75) photograph demonstrate (Fig. 17–1), American graphic design during the 1920s and 1930s was dominated by traditional illustration. However, the modern approach slowly gained ground on several fronts: book design, editorial design for fashion and business magazines catering to affluent audiences, and promotional and corporate graphics.
When Tschichold’s “Elementare Typographie” insert was publicized in America, it caused considerable excitement and turmoil. Editors and writers savagely attacked it as “typographic fireworks” and a “typographic revolution” of “insane jugglings of type by a band of crazy, foreign type anarchists.” But a small number of American typographers and designers recognized the vitality and functionalism of the new ideas. In 1928 and 1929 new typeface designs, including Futura and Kabel, became available in America, spurring the modern movement forward.
A number of book designers, including William Addison Dwiggins (1880–1956), were transitional designers whose work ranged from the classical tradition of Goudy and Rogers to the new typography of Tschichold. After two decades in advertising design, Dwiggins began designing books for Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He established Knopf’s reputation for excellence in book design, experimenting with uncommon title-page arrangements and two-column book formats. His stenciled ornaments (Fig. 17–2) combined the sensibility of the cubist collage with the grace of traditional ornament. His eighteen typeface designs for Mergenthaler Linotype include Caledonia (1938), a graceful text face; Electra (1935), a modern design with reduced thick-and-thin contrast; and Metro (1929), Linotype’s geometric sans serif designed to compete with Futura and Kabel. Additionally, Dwiggins was a significant critic of the developing profession of which he was a part, and he was very aware of the psychological impact of graphic design on advertising. In his 1922 article “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design” for the Boston Evening Transcript he introduced the term graphic design. However, this label was not generally used until the 1940s.
Other important book designers of the period include Merle Armitage (1893–1975), whose typographic expressions ranged from Renaissance-inspired designs to books for avant-garde music and dance that helped define the modernist design aesthetic in America (Fig. 17–3).
Lester Beall (1903–69) was a Kansas City native who moved to Chicago, where he earned an art history degree from the University of Chicago in 1926 and took painting classes at the Chicago Art Institute. Beall was primarily self-taught; his extensive reading and curious intellect formed the basis for his professional development. After gaining experience in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a graphic designer whose work broke with traditional American advertising layout, Beall moved his studio to New York in 1935. In the challenging social and economic environment of the Depression era, he attempted to develop strong, direct, and exciting visual forms. Beall understood Tschichold’s new typography and the Dada movement’s random organization, intuitive placement of elements, and use of chance in the creative process (Fig. 17–4). Admiring the strong character and form of nineteenth-century American wood types, Beall delighted in incorporating them into his work during this period. Often, flat planes of color and elementary signs such as arrows were combined with photography, as Beall sought visual contrast and a high level of informational content. The design of Figure 17–5 has strong horizontal movements contrasting with a rhythm of verticals. Images are layered in space; here a transparent illustration of a pioneer overprints two photographs. Beall’s posters for the Rural Electrification Administration, a federal agency charged with bringing electricity to the less populated areas of America where close to 80 percent of farms still lacked electricity, were directed toward a part of the population with a rudimentary education; pro-electrification messages were reduced to elemental signs (Fig. 17–6). One poster series combined photomontage with the red and white stripes of the American flag (Fig. 17–7). These designs were so well received that in 1939, Beall’s posters were among the first to be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1951 Beall moved his studio from New York City to his country home in Connecticut. In this new environment, and in response to client and social changes, Beall became increasingly involved in the emerging corporate design movement of the 1950s and 1960s (see chapter 20).
Immigrants to America
A migration began slowly and reached a peak in the late 1930s, as cultural leaders from Europe, including many graphic designers, came to America. The design language they brought with them, and the changes imposed on their work by their American experience, forms an important phase of the development of American graphic design.
One of the most prominent émigré book designers was Georg Salter (1897–1967). After being barred from freelance employment in Germany because of his Jewish lineage, Salter immigrated to New York in 1934. Between 1922 and 1934 Salter had produced more than 350 book designs for thirty-three different German publishers. Over two-thirds of Salter’s commissions were book jackets, which became his trademark. His sensitivity to literary expression made him the ideal artist to capture a book’s contents on its cover. As a result, his designs were signature pieces for some of the important literary works of the twentieth century. His design for Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is a triumph from this period (Fig. 17–8).
Salter was the quintessential hybrid modernist whose versatility drew on calligraphy, photomontage, airbrush scenes, panoramic watercolors, and pen-and-ink drawings. Salter knew that a cover design must entice a potential reader to buy, and to this end his covers from the 1920s and early 1930s awaken visionary images of the works that are typically more suggestive than concrete.
Simon and Schuster gave Salter his first commissions, ten of which appeared in 1935. One of the most striking is the poster-style cover for Frank Buck’s Fang and Claw (Fig. 17–9). Among some of Salter’s finest color work from the 1930s is the remarkable cover for William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (Random House, 1936) (Fig. 17–10), which achieves an eerie effect through the use of airbrush and dynamic lettering to convey a psychological state. Such characteristic lettering expressed uncertainty, fear, and states of emotional disturbance. Salter continued to play a major role in American book design until his death in 1967.
It is a curious coincidence that four individuals who brought European modernism to American graphic design —Erté (born Romain de Tirtoff, 1892–1990), Mehemed Fehmy Agha (1896–1978), Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971), and Alexander Liberman (1912–1999)—were Russian-born, French-educated immigrants who worked in editorial design for fashion magazines.
Erté was a Russian admiral’s son, born in Saint Petersburg. After becoming a prominent Paris illustrator and set designer working in the art deco manner, he was signed to an exclusive contract from 1924 until 1937 to design covers and fashion illustrations for Harper’s Bazaar magazine (Fig. 17–11). Renowned for his fashion designs, set designs, illustrations, and graphics, Erté became a major proponent of the art deco sensibility. His work combined the stylized drawing of synthetic cubism, an exotic decorativeness, and the elegance of high fashion.
Mehemed Fehmy Agha was the first art director trained in modern design to guide the graphic destiny of a major American periodical. Born to Turkish parents in Ukraine, part of the Russian Empire at the time, Agha studied art in Kiev and received advanced degrees in languages in Paris. After working in Paris as a graphic artist, he moved to Berlin, where in 1928 he met Condé Nast (1873–1942), who had come to close down the unprofitable Berlin edition of Vogue magazine and was seeking a new art director for the American Vogue. Impressed with Agha’s graphics, Nast persuaded him to come to New York as Vogue’s art director. Energetic and uncompromising, Agha soon took over design responsibilities for Vanity Fair and House & Garden as well. He overhauled Condé Nast’s stuffy, dated approach to editorial design by introducing bleed photography, machine-set sans-serif type, white space, and asymmetrical layouts.
Carmel Snow (1887–1961) invited Alexey Brodovitch to become art director of the Hearst magazine Harper’s Bazaar, where he remained from 1934 until 1958. Brodovitch, a Russian who had fought in the czar’s cavalry during World War I, immigrated to Paris in 1920 and established himself as a leading contemporary designer there before heading to the United States in 1930. With an affinity for white space and sharp type on clear, open pages, he rethought the approach to editorial design (Figs. 17–12 and 17–13). He sought “a musical feeling” in the flow of text and pictures. The rhythmic environment of open space balancing text was energized by the art and photography he commissioned from major European artists, including Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), Diane Arbus (1923–71), Lisette Model (1901–83), A. M. Cassandre (Fig. 17–14), Salvador Dalí (Fig. 17–15), Man Ray, and the Hungarian Martin Munkacsi (1896–1963). He also cultivated the careers of Irving Penn (1917–2009) and Richard Avedon (1923–2004).
“Astonish me” was Brodovitch’s unceasing request. Munkacsi’s new compositions slapped long-held conventions of editorial photography in the face (Fig. 17–16). Munkacsi was one of a new breed of editorial and advertising photographers who combined the visual dynamic learned from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray with the fresh approach to photography made possible by the new 35mm Leica “miniature” camera. Invented by an employee of the Leitz Company of Germany in 1913, this small portable camera was not introduced until much later because its production was delayed by World War I. With the addition of faster, higher-resolution films, this camera became an extension of the photographer’s vision.
Brodovitch taught designers how to use photography at his “design laboratory,” initially located at the new art school begun by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then at the New School in New York City (Fig. 17–17). His cropping, enlargement, and juxtaposition of images and his exquisite selection from contact sheets were all accomplished with extraordinary intuitive judgment (Figs. 17–18, 17–19, and 17–20). He saw contrast as a dominant tool in editorial design and paid close attention to the graphic movement through the editorial pages of each issue.
Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Alexander Liberman spent his early years in Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux- Arts. After working for Cassandre he was hired as a layout designer by the French weekly magazine Vu and in 1933 was appointed its art director (Fig. 17–21). The masthead of Vu was designed by Cassandre, and its use of photography was a source of inspiration for Life magazine after Time founder Henry Luce (1898–1967) bought the rights to its name in 1936. In 1940 Liberman immigrated to the United States, where he joined the design section at Condé Nast. Initially a layout designer for Vogue, he succeeded Agha as the magazine’s art director in 1943 and actively competed against Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar. Using photographers such as Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton (1904–80), Lillian Bassman (1917–2012), André Kértesz (1894–1985), and Lee Miller (1907–77), he enlivened Vogue with current images. He was appointed editorial director of all Condé Nast publications in 1961 and remained in that position until his retirement thirty years later (Fig. 17–22).
Joseph Binder came to the United States in 1934 for a series of lectures and workshops and soon received wide acclaim. Encouraged by the response to his work, he settled in New York the following year. In America, Binder’s technique became more refined, partly because he had begun to use the airbrush to achieve highly finished forms. His strong cubist beginnings eventually yielded to a stylized realism.
In Binder’s 1939 New York World’s Fair poster (Fig. 17–23), the trylon and perisphere, emblems of the fair, combine with spotlights, a skyline, and modern transportation images to symbolize America’s coming of age on the eve of World War II. World events would soon force the United States to cast aside its neutrality, traditionalism, and provincialism; the new embrace of modernist design was part of this process. Traces of cubism remained in Binder’s work, as can be seen in his 1939 poster for iced coffee (Fig. 17–24), where two-dimensional planes support the illustrative content. During his Vienna period (see Fig. 14–61), Binder had constructed images from planes; now the subject matter became dominant, and design qualities were subordinated to pictorial imagery.
The Works Progress Administration Poster Project
As part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935. Direct relief for the unemployed was replaced by work opportunities, and billions of dollars were inserted into the economy as an average of more than two million workers were paid from fifteen to ninety dollars per month from 1935 until 1941. Launched in the fall of 1935, the WPA Federal Art Project enabled actors, musicians, visual artists, and writers to continue their professional careers. A poster project was included among the various cultural programs. Sculptors and painters joined unemployed illustrators and graphic designers in the studios. Many poster designs were by artists, and the project took a strong aesthetic approach to typography, used as both compositional element and message communicator (Figs. 17–25 and 17–26).
From 1935 until 1939, when the Federal Art Project was abolished, over two million copies of approximately thirty-five thousand poster designs were produced. Most of the designs were silk-screened. Silk-screen printing’s characteristic flat color combined with influences from the Bauhaus, pictorial modernism, and constructivism to produce a modernist result that contrasted with the traditional illustration dominating much of American mass-media graphics of the era. Government-sponsored cultural events, including theatrical performances and art exhibitions, were frequent subjects for the poster project, as were public-service communications about health, crime prevention, housing, and education.
The flight from fascism
The rise of fascism in Europe created one of the greatest transnational migrations of intellectual and creative talent in history. Scientists, authors, architects, artists, and designers left Europe for the haven of North America during the late 1930s. Among them were the artists Ernst, Duchamp, and Mondrian. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, faculty, students, and alumni dispersed throughout the world and made modern design a truly international movement. Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer transplanted the functionalist architectural movement to the United States, and Herbert Bayer and Moholy-Nagy brought their innovative approaches to graphic design. Other European graphic designers who came to America and made significant contributions to design include Will Burtin, Jean Carlu, George Giusti, Herbert Matter, and Ladislav Sutnar.
Sponsored by the Association of Arts and Industries, Moholy-Nagy arrived in Chicago in 1937 and established the New Bauhaus. This closed after just one year due to inadequate financial support, but Moholy-Nagy managed to open the School of Design in 1939. The primary source of financial support came from Moholy-Nagy himself and other faculty members, many of whom agreed to teach without pay if necessary. Both Carlu and Bayer also found it difficult to find clients who comprehended their work during their first months in America.
Burtin (1908–72), recognized as one of Germany’s outstanding designers, fled Germany in 1938 after refusing to work for the Nazi regime. His work combined a graphic clarity and directness with a lucid presentation of the subject matter. The “Design Decade” Architectural Forum cover (Fig. 17–27) demonstrates his ability to bring together structural form and symbolic information in a cohesive whole. The dates, printed on acetate, combine with the architect’s tools to signify design during the preceding decade; shadows become integral forms in the design. Burtin’s keen understanding of science is reflected in designs for the Upjohn pharmaceutical company interpreting such complex subjects as bacteriology (Fig. 17–28). In 1943 Burtin left Upjohn to work on government training manuals, followed by three years as art director of Fortune magazine. In 1948 he became a design consultant for Upjohn and other companies, making a major contribution to the visual interpretation of graphic information.
A patron of design
A major figure in the development of American modern design beginning in the 1930s was a Chicago industrialist, Walter P. Paepcke (1896–1960), who founded the Container Corporation of America (CCA) in 1926. Paepcke pioneered the manufacture of paperboard and corrugated-fiber containers. Acquisitions and expansion enabled CCA to become a national company and the nation’s largest producer of packaging materials. Paepcke was unique among the large industrialists of his generation, for he recognized that design could both serve a pragmatic business purpose and become a major cultural thrust on the part of the corporation. His interest was inspired by his wife, artist Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke (1902–94), who prompted her husband to hire perhaps the first corporate design director in America. In 1936 Egbert Jacobson (1890–1966) was selected as the first director of CCA’s new department of design. As with Behrens’s design program for AEG early in the century, CCA’s new visual signature (and its implementation) was based on two ingredients: the vision of the designer, and a supportive client.
Paepcke was an advocate and patron of design. He had maintained a long-standing interest in the Bauhaus, perhaps as a response to the school’s experiments with paper materials and structures. Moved by Moholy-Nagy’s commitment and determination, Paepcke provided much-needed moral and financial support to the Institute of Design. By the time of Moholy-Nagy’s tragic early death from leukemia on 24 November 1946, the institute was on a firm educational and organizational footing.
CCA’s advertising agency was N. W. Ayer, where art director Charles Coiner (1898–1989) made a major contribution. Coiner had previously designed the well-known (and often satirized) National Recovery Act logo, which appeared across the country in support of federally funded programs to combat the Depression. Beginning in May 1937, Cassandre was commissioned to design a series of CCA advertisements that defied American advertising conventions. The traditional headline and body copy were replaced by a dominant visual that extended a simple statement about CCA (Fig. 17–29). Unlike the long-winded copywriting of most 1930s advertising, many CCA advertisements had only a dozen words.
When Cassandre returned to Paris in 1939, CCA continued his basic approach by commissioning advertisements from other artists and designers of international stature, including Bayer (who was retained as a consulting designer by Jacobson and then served as chairman of CCA’s department of design from 1956 to 1965), Léger, Man Ray, Matter, and Carlu.
The war years
While the trauma of war disrupted the ability of many governments to produce graphic propaganda, a diverse group of painters, illustrators, and designers received commissions from the U.S. Office of War Information. America’s wartime graphics ranged from brilliantly conceived posters to informational training materials and amateurish cartoons.
In 1941, as America’s entry into the global conflict seemed inevitable, the federal government began to develop propaganda posters to promote production. Charles Coiner became its art consultant as America’s colossal defense buildup began. He commissioned Carlu to create one of the finest designs of his career, the famous “America’s answer! Production” poster (Fig. 17–30). Over one hundred thousand copies were distributed throughout the country, and the New York Art Director’s Club Exhibition recognized Carlu with a top award. Intense feelings about Hitler, Pearl Harbor, and the war seemed to pull powerful communications from the graphic designers, illustrators, and fine artists commissioned to create posters for the Office of War Information. Illustrator John Atherton (1900–52), creator of numerous Saturday Evening Post covers, penetrated to the heart of the problem of careless talk, gossip, and discussion of troop movements as a source of enemy information (Fig. 17–31). Binder’s poster proposal for the U.S. Army Air Corps (Fig. 17–32) is potent in its simplicity, signifying the essence of the air corps through minimal means. Impact is achieved by dramatic contrasts of color and scale. Edward McKnight Kauffer was commissioned to design posters to boost the morale of the Allied nations (Fig. 17–33); an image of Hermes, the classical Greek messenger of the Gods, combines with an American flag to make a powerful graphic symbol. The social realist Ben Shahn (1898–1969), whose paintings addressed political and economic injustice during the Depression, reached a larger audience in posters conveying Nazi brutality (Fig. 17–34). He achieved communicative power with intense graphic forms: the implication of a prison by closing the space with a wall; the hood masking the victim’s identity; the simple, straightforward headline; and the factual urgency of a telegram.
The posters Bayer produced during and after the war were surprisingly illustrative compared to his constructivist approach during the Dessau Bauhaus period. His 1939/40 cover for PM was one of the last designs he made before this change in his design approach became evident (Fig. 17–35). Sensitive to his new audience and oriented toward communications problem solving, Bayer painted illustrations with a simplified realism and then combined these with the hierarchy of information and strong underlying composition he pioneered at Dessau. In his poster promoting egg production, the large white egg centered against the black sky becomes a strong focal point (Fig. 17–36). The headline to the left balances the flaming town to the right, and the diagonal subheading echoes the shadow cast by the egg.
When one compares Bayer’s 1949 poster for polio research (Fig. 17–37) with his 1926 poster for the Kandinsky Jubilee Exhibition (see Fig. 16–21), the two designs are clearly worlds apart. The Kandinsky poster was designed by a twenty-six-year-old typography teacher at a young school optimistically hoping to build a new social order by design; the polio research poster is the work of a forty-eight-year-old designer living in a foreign land, after a European war in which twenty-six million people were killed. The photography and typography of Bayer’s Bauhaus period yielded to hand-painted illustration and hand-lettering, but the commitment to functional communication, the integration of letterforms and imagery, and the asymmetrical balance remained constant.
During World War II, CCA innovated uses for paperboard packaging, which freed metals and other strategic materials for the war effort. A “Paperboard Goes to War” advertising campaign (Fig. 17–38) continued the design experimentation of the earlier institutional ads. Before the war, there was still a degree of public concern about the strength of paperboard; this campaign prepared the way for its extensive use after the war. Each advertisement showed a specific use of a CCA product in the war effort. Bayer, Carlu, and Matter joined Jacobson in creating powerful economical statements directly striking the essence of the communications problem. Strong visuals were used with two or three lines of typography, often placed diagonally in counterpoint to compositional lines from the illustration or montage.
After the war
The United States demobilized millions of troops and converted industry from wartime needs to consumer markets after World War II. Seeking another institutional advertising campaign using fine art, CCA decided to commission paintings by artists from each of the then forty-eight states (Fig. 17–39). A simple copy line appeared under each full-color painting, followed by the CCA logotype. The series served to advance a Bauhaus ideal: the union of art with life. Once selected, artists were allowed the freedom of their artistic convictions. A major corporate art collection, now housed in the Smithsonian Institution, was assembled.
After the state series was completed, CCA developed one of the most brilliant institutional campaigns in the history of advertising. Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke were attending the Great Books discussion group conducted in Chicago by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. These two scholars were also editing the Great Books of the Western World series, which included two volumes discussing the ideas contained in the series. Walter Paepcke approached Adler with the possibility of an institutional ad campaign presenting the great ideas of Western culture. Each would present an artist’s interpretation of a great idea selected by Adler and his colleagues. The Paepckes joined Bayer and Jacobson to form a jury to select the visual artists who would be asked to bring graphic actualization to these abstract concepts. Beginning in February 1950, this unprecedented institutional campaign transcended the bounds of advertising, as ideas about liberty, justice, and human rights were conveyed to an audience of business leaders, investors, prospective employees, and molders of public opinion. The campaign ran over three decades, with 157 visual artists creating artwork for almost two hundred “Great Ideas” advertisements. Art ranged from painted and sculptural portraits to geometric abstraction, symbolic interpretations (Fig. 17–40), and collage.
Just as CCA set the standard of excellence for institutional advertising in the postwar era, Brodovitch remained the preeminent designer for magazines. In addition to his skills as an editorial designer, Brodovitch developed an exceptional gift for identifying and assisting new talent. Photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn both received early commissions and advice from Brodovitch. Art Kane (1925–95) was another Brodovitch protégé. Kane worked as a photo retoucher and art director of Seventeen magazine before turning to photography. He was a master of symbolism, multiple exposure, and the reduction of photography to essential images needed to convey the essence of content with compelling conviction. During the early 1950s Brodovitch designed the short-lived visual arts magazine Portfolio (Fig. 17–41). At the height of his graphic powers, Brodovitch gave this publication a seldom-matched elegance and visual flow through pacing, the cropping of images, and use of color and texture. Large images, dynamic space, and inserts on colored and rough-textured papers (Fig. 17–42) contrast with smooth, coated white paper. The magazine covered subjects such as Jackson Pollack and the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. A 138-centimeter foldout photographic essay (Fig. 17–43) on the Mummer’s Parade, punctuated with vertical columns of filmstrips, is sequential and kinetic. Although much admired, Portfolio lasted for only three issues, largely because of its rejection of advertising.
Herbert Matter, meanwhile, received freelance design commissions from CCA and design and photographic assignments from other clients, including Vogue, Fortune, and Harper’s Bazaar. Matter’s editorial design solutions deftly exploited photography, as shown in his cover for the October issue of Fortune (Fig. 17–44). In 1946, he began a twenty-year period as a graphic-design and photography consultant to the Knoll Associates furniture design and manufacturing firm, for whom he produced some of his finest work. Matter’s advertisements for molded-plastic chairs by Eero Saarinen are remarkable in their dynamic composition (Fig. 17–45). Biomorphic shapes, while quite fashionable during the late 1940s and early 1950s in painting, furniture, and other design forms, became trapped in this time frame and are now associated with the sensibilities of the period. It is a tribute to Matter’s strong grasp of design fundamentals that the advertising series he created for Saarinen furniture has maintained its vitality long after the forms of the era have become dated. During the 1950s Matter turned toward more purely photographic solutions. His ability to convey concepts with images is shown in the folder (also used as advertisements on two consecutive right-hand magazine pages) unveiling a new line of molded-plastic pedestal furniture (Fig. 17–46). Matter’s “Chimney Sweeper” proved to be the most enduring advertisement in the history of the company (Fig. 17–47), the culmination of one of the most lasting designer-client relations in American graphic design. At other times Matter developed almost purely typographic designs. In his catalogue cover for an Alexander Calder exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the suspended letters of Calder’s name are used to imply the artist’s mobile sculptures (Fig. 17–48).
Born to Italian and Swiss parents, George Giusti (1908–90) worked in both Italy and Switzerland before coming to New York City in 1938 and opening a design office. He possessed a unique ability to reduce forms and images to a simplified, minimal essence. His images become iconographic and symbolic. Giusti’s freely drawn images included evidence of process in his work; an image painted in transparent dyes has areas of flooded and blotted color, and his three-dimensional illustrations often include the bolts or other fasteners used to assemble the elements. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing well into the 1960s, Giusti received frequent commissions for his bold, iconographic images for advertising campaigns and for cover designs of Holiday (Fig. 17–49) and Fortune magazines.
Informational and scientific graphics
Ladislav Sutnar came to New York as design director of the Czechoslovakian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, the year Hitler seized his country. Sutnar remained in New York and became a vital force in the evolution of modern design in the United States. Beginning in 1941, a close association with Sweet’s Catalog Service enabled Sutnar to place an indelible mark on the design of industrial product information. A new trademark (Fig. 17–50) established the typographic character of Sweet’s printed matter.
Since 1906 Sweet’s had provided a compendium of architectural and industrial product information. Working closely with Sweet’s research director, the Danish-born architect Knud Lönberg-Holm, Sutnar developed a system for structuring information in a logical and consistent manner. In two landmark books, Catalog Design and Catalog Design Progress (Fig. 17–51), they documented and explained their approach to a generation of designers, writers, and clients. Informational design was defined as a synthesis of function, flow, and form. Function is utilitarian need with a definite purpose: to make information easy to find, read, comprehend, and recall. Flow means the logical sequence of information. Sutnar felt the basic unit was not the page but the “visual unit,” that is, the double-page spread. He rejected traditional margins and used bleeds extensively. He used shape, line, and color as functional elements to direct the eye as it moved through the design seeking information. The format of Catalog Design Progress itself has a coding system (Fig. 17–52) of signs, numbers, and words, with a triangle at the bottom of title pages pointing the reader forward.
As Sutnar approached problems of form, static and uniform arrangements of catalogue information gave way to dynamic information patterns and clear, rational organization. Each catalogue has a unifying graphic theme, and visual articulation of type—underlining, size and weight contrasts, spacing, color, and reversing—aided searching, scanning, and reading. A simple visualization language with emphasis on graphic charts, diagrams, and pictures clarified complex information and saved reading time. Optical unity resulted from a systematic use of line, shape, color, and type. These elements were combined into “visual traffic signs” to assist the user in the search for information.
An important milestone in the visual presentation of data was the publication of the World Geo-Graphic Atlas by CCA in 1953. In an introduction, Paepcke spoke of a need for “a better understanding of other peoples and nations.” The designer and editor, Bayer, labored for five years on the project. Once again, Paepcke behaved unlike the conventional businessman, for CCA published a 368-page atlas filled with 120 full-page maps of the world supported by 1,200 diagrams, graphs, charts, symbols, and other graphic communications about the planet. This atlas was distributed to clients, suppliers, libraries, and museums. Bayer assembled information from multiple scientific disciplines, including geography, astronomy, climatology, economics, and sociology, and presented it through symbols, charts, and diagrams. Detailed information about states and countries was presented (Figs. 17–53 and 17–54). Bayer and his assistants delivered each page to the printer as a single gouache painting with Futura type pasted onto an acetate overlay.
Bayer was ahead of his time in his effort to inventory earth resources and study the planet as a series of interlocking geophysical and life systems. Prophetically, the final section of the World Geo-Graphic Atlas discusses the conservation of resources, addressing population growth and resource depletion. Bayer used R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection, a map that shows the globe in two dimensions without distortion, as a base for pictographs representing population and rectangles of black dots symbolizing energy consumption (Fig. 17–55). It demonstrated that North America had only 8 percent of the world’s population but consumed 73 percent of its energy.
Many of the immigrants who brought European design concepts to the United States arrived virtually penniless and with minimal possessions, but they were armed with talent, ideas, and a strong belief in design as a valuable human activity that could contribute to the improvement of human communication and the human condition. The American experience was greatly enriched by their presence.