Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  INFORMATION

  Catalog Design Progress

  LADISLAV SUTNAR

  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 initial attempt to introduce strict design systems to business, but the Great Depression demanded that the focus be on 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. This revolutionary approach to design began simultaneously in Germany, Russia, and Holland, and swept through Eastern Europe as well. Ladislav Sutnar (1897–1976), a graphic, product, and exhibition designer, led the charge in Czechoslovakia years before emigrating to the United States.

  Sutnar was such an enthusiastic propagandist for industrialization that he was introduced to Karl Lönberg-Holm, the publicity director of the Sweet’s Catalog Service, the largest American industrial catalog publisher, who instantly arranged for Sutnar to become his art director. Lönberg-Holm quickly became the other half of Sutnar’s brain. Their collaboration was to information design what Gilbert and Sullivan were to light opera or Rogers and Hammerstein were to the Broadway musical. Together they composed and wrote Catalog Design (1944) and Catalog Design Progress (1950). The former introduced a variety of radical systematic departures in catalog design, the latter fine-tuned those models to show how complex information could be organized and, most importantly, retrieved. More than forty years after its publication, Catalog Design Progress is still an archetype for functional design. Sweet’s Catalog Service was a facilitator for countless, disparate 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 organizing device was the overall binding, otherwise chaos reigned. Lönberg-Holm had convinced his boss, Chauncey Williams, the president of F. W. Dodge, to order an entire reevaluation from 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 catalogs (some of which were designed by Sutnar’s in-house art department).

  Sutnar was one of the first designers to design double spreads rather than single pages, an aspect of his methodology that is so common today that in retrospect the fact that it was an innovation could easily be overlooked. A casual perusal of Sutnar’s designs for everything from catalogs to brochures from 1941 on, with the exception of covers, reveals a preponderance of spreads on which his signature navigational devices force the users to follow logically contiguous levels of information. Through these spreads Sutnar was able to harness certain avant-garde principles and therefore injected visual excitement into even the most routine material without impinging upon accessibility. While his basic structure was decidedly rational, his juxtapositions, scale, and color were rooted in abstraction. Underlying Sutnar’s modern mission was the desire to introduce aesthetics into, say, a plumber’s life.

  The Medium Is the Massage

  QUENTIN FIORE

  The Medium Is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (b. 1920) is the touchstone of media lore and doctrine from the 1960s. It was required reading for everyone concerned with what McLuhan dubbed the “electric age,” or how technology in general, and new communications media specifically, would alter people’s lives. McLuhan was a philosopher and prognosticator whose books The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, explored the evolution of technology and its effects on the way mankind thinks, acts, and reacts. He was revered by some, attacked by others. Critics called him a fake, charlatan, and savant, arguing that his ideas were simplistic, obtuse, and contradictory. McLuhan countered that contradiction was endemic to contemporary life; contradiction was the metaphor for television, a medium that allowed a person to ponder two or more ideas at one time.

  McLuhan believed that the invention of printing had shattered community by destroying the oral tradition. He argued that writing and reading were solitary acts that conflicted with tribal unity, memory, and imagination. Electronic media, television mostly, was destined to return us to a global village, allowing individuals once again to take an active role in the communications process. Media were extensions of human activity (e.g., the wheel was an extension of the foot). Television, he insisted, would allow for greater individual participation.

  Was this genius or hocus-pocus? Critic Marvin Kitman referred to this book as “The Tedium is the Message.” Indeed The Medium Is the Massage’s contents by McLuhan and graphics by Fiore came under harsh criticism. But this should not eclipse the historic nature of Fiore’s work.

  McLuhan believed that the invention of printing had shattered community by destroying the oral tradition.

  The Medium Is the Massage (the title comes from mass-age, a double-entendre used to underscore McLuhan’s notion that media are so pervasive that they work people over like a masseuse) was the first book for the television age. New York Times critic Eliot Freemont Smith wrote that the large format of the hardcover took on “the aspect of a TV screen.” Fiore, who initiated the project with the help of Jerome Agel, a book packager, designed it as a kinetically flowing collection of word bites and iconic images set in economical (Helvetica) type. He underscored McLuhan’s ideas with what might be called a series of literary billboards—double-page spreads with large call-outs and blurbs. McLuhan described them (perhaps sarcastically) as “collide-oscopic interfaced situations.”

  The Massage heralded a number of firsts: the first time that a paperback preceded the hardcover version into the marketplace; the first time such cinematic visual pacing was applied to American book design; the first book coordinated by a “producer,” Jerome Agel, who takes credit for orchestrating its “sound and music.” And although not a first, most important, was the close conceptual relationship between the designer and writer—like those of Lazar El Lissitzky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky, Guylas Williams and Robert Benchley. Although the collaborators were not in constant contact during the creation of the book, Fiore was in tune with McLuhan’s thinking so that the concrete presentation of McLuhan’s often complex (and contradictory) ideas was made accessible.

  Fiore was born in New York in 1920. He had been a student of George Grosz at the Art Students League and of Hans Hoffman at the Hoffman School. He was a devotee of classical drawing, papermaking, and lettering and began his career before World War II as a letterer for graphic designer Lester Beall (for whom he designed many of the modern display letters used in ads and brochures before modern typefaces were available in the United States) and for Condé Nast, Life, and other magazines (where he hand-lettered headlines for editorial and advertising pages). He left lettering to become a graphic designer, and for many years designed all the printed matter for the Ford Foundation in a modern but not rigid style. Since he was interested in the clear presentation of information, he was well suited as a design consultant to various university presses, and later to Bell Laboratories (for whom he designed the numbers for one of Henry Dryfuss’s rotary dials). In the late 1960s he also worked on Homefax, an early telephone facsimile machine developed (but never marketed) at RCA/ NBC, where he coordinated an early electronic newspaper.

  Fiore predicted the widespread use of computer-generated design, talking computers, and home fax and photocopy technologies. He also predicted the applications of the computer in primary school education long before its widespread use, and accordingly in 1968 he
designed two hundred computer-like “interactive” books for school children to help increase literacy skills. McLuhan’s philosophy was a logical extension of Fiore’s own practice.

  The second coproduction with McLuhan was, by Fiore’s own admission, less successful than The Massage. War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations that Could Be Eliminated with More Feed forward was assailed by one critic as a crankish, repetitive, and disjointed tome in which McLuhan’s puns had become a nervous tic. McLuhan based his book on the bewildering idea that war is a result of the anxiety aroused when changing metaphors in perception fail to yield up familiar self-images. Fiore’s design was a mosaic of disparate imagery and text, which struggled with little success to reign in McLuhan’s humorless meanderings. Fiore next worked on a book with Buckminster Fuller, entitled I Am a Verb, which could be read from front to back and back to front. Each is emblematic of the times.

  Jerry Rubin’s Do It! was also designed in the manner of The Medium Is the Massage. Although universally panned by the critics, it became a bible of the 1960s. Fiore worked directly with the former yippie leader, typographically emphasizing certain ideas in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the dadaists and futurists. Photographs were also used as icons and exclamation points and strewn through the text to add sight and sound to an idea or pronouncement. Fiore was as anarchic as possible while still working within the constraints of bookmaking. His design was ahead of its time, but he believed that the methods he adopted were simply the most appropriate ways to convey the information. “They were just jobs, each requiring special treatment,” he said.

  New York Subway Map

  MASSIMO VIGNELLI

  At the end of a meeting in the early 1990s where Vignelli and Associates presented a comprehensive redesign of the subway train interiors for the New York Transit System, one of the members of the selection committee asked, “Mrs. Vignelli, you once said in your book [Design: Vignelli] that it is not pleasant to work with the Transit Authority. Why do you want to be involved in a project like this again?” Without hesitating Lella Vignelli responded, “Because we are socially responsible.” The unpleasantness referred to was the design of the New York City subway map in 1970, one of Vignelli and Associates’ most well-known and difficult achievements.

  In 1965 Massimo Vignelli (b. 1931) moved to the United States from Italy and cofounded Unimark with Bob Noorda, a Dutch graphic designer and former art director at Pirelli in Milan. In the early 1960s Noorda designed informational graphics for the Milan subway system, which helped Unimark get the job to create signage for the New York Subway in 1966, and which later led to designing the map.

  Vignelli’s training as an architect in Italy in the mid-1950s and his study with the Swiss graphic designer Max Huber made him a veteran of the grid. In those early years Vignelli also began a long-lasting friendship with Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, and one of the top semioticians in the world. “We were analyzing everything according to a semiotic grid. It was just natural for us, like the ABCs.” Semiotics is the study of symbology, the notion that every sign (word, letter, image, number, etc.) is arbitrary and has meaning only when it represents an idea or thing. Vignelli sees the semiotic grid as a relationship between semantics (the meaning of the information), syntactics (its visual representation) and pragmatics (the effect of the sign on the receiver). It’s a closed-loop system to make sure a design clearly and consistently represents the proper message and that the audience receives that message as intended.

  The map bypassed the literal and focused on the relationships inherent in the information and at the same time exemplified the essence of orthodox modernist principles.

  For Vignelli the semiotic grid is the sine qua non of communication design and the perfect tool to untangle the jumble the subway system had become by the 1960s. The IRT, BMT, and IND had grown sporadically into 714 miles of track with some 465 stations. The signage project began with an analysis of the traffic flow to identify points of decision and levels of information. From that, Vignelli devised a modular system of signs each designed as individual units, like the letters of an alphabet, which were then hung together to form informational sentences. Mathematical precision and rationality informed every part of the system from the prefabricated signs in lengths of one, two, four, or eight feet, to the typography that was similarly modulated with the smallest type on the informational panels one-half the size of the type on the directional panels, and that one-half the size of the typography on the station identification signs.

  Vignelli wanted to hang the signs from thick black support bars that he believed would unify the information. This echoed his earlier work for the Piccolo Teatro (1964) in Milan, a poster that featured his signature style of tightly spaced sans-serif typography and introduced the concept of “information bands,” information separated by wide black rules, which became characteristic of his designs in the following years. The Transit Authority never installed the black support bars, but rather painted black bars across the tops of the panels.

  In 1971 Massimo Vignelli left Unimark and with his wife Lella established Vignelli and Associates and Vignelli Designs in New York. Lella was named president of Vignelli Designs, the branch of the firm responsible for product and furniture design. Vignelli and Associates was commissioned to design a map for the subway system that would untangle the web of train lines on the existing one. Vignelli had initially envisioned an interrelated system of maps: an overall system map, a geographic map indicating the relationship of the subway to the geography, a detailed neighborhood map to re-orient the traveler upon arrival at a new destination, a pocket map, and what Vignelli called a “verbal map”—intended for the main stations that featured written directions from point A to point B in language that Mama would use, “Take train #6 to 59th Street, transfer to train RR and get off at Times Square.” Pointing out that 50 percent of the population is verbally oriented and 50 percent is visually oriented, Vignelli’s verbal map directly addressed the needs of the public. Although one was implemented in Grand Central Station, the verbal maps were shelved, along with the neighborhood and geographic maps, victims of budgets and bureaucracy.

  But the overall system map and the pocket map survived. Researching and learning from previous underground system maps, like Beck’s London Underground map, Vignelli, too, organized his subway map on a grid, orienting the “spaghetti work” of the railways to the verticals, horizontals and forty-five-degree angles of the page. Each line had a different color, bright primary colors, and either a number or letter designation appearing at the beginning, at the end, and at intervals along the route. Every station was listed. Every stop had a dot. A dot on the line indicated the train stopped at that station. No dot, no stop. The web of lines dominated the background of white abstracted land masses, with the surrounding waters a mid-range gray, and parks designated with geometric forms in a darker shade of gray. The map was distorted, with the central, more congested areas larger and the outlying areas truncated. Vignelli used layering, separation, and color to differentiate the planes of information. This system of representation clarified what was important to the traveler: how to go from point A to point B. The map bypassed the literal and focused on the relationships inherent in the information and at the same time exemplified the essence of orthodox modernist principles.

  Soon after the system map was put into effect, the official at the Transit Authority who originally commissioned Vignelli and Associates retired. His replacement called for a new map. He criticized the Vignelli map for lacking reference to the natural geography: the water was not blue, the parks were not green. Vigorous campaigning to retain the award-winning map eventually failed to convince this new official who, as Vignelli described, “had the knife by the handle.” The map was replaced in 1979.

  New York Subway Map Goes Digital

  MASSIMO VIGNELLI AND ASSOCIATES

  In 1972, Vignelli Associates designed a diagrammatic map fo
r the New York City subway. It was a radical departure. He replaced the serpentine maze of geographically accurate train routes with simple, bold bands of color that turned at 45-and 90-degree angles. Each route was color-coded, its stops indicated by black dots. Its abstract representation of the routes was elegant but flawed. To make the map function effectively, a few geographic liberties were taken, something that didn’t sit well with New Yorkers.

  For instance, the new map showed Central Park as a square; Vignelli reasoned that for people riding underground, the park’s rectangular proportions were irrelevant. Along Central Park West there are fewer stops than in Midtown, so logic dictated that less map space was required. Vignelli was absolutely right, but New Yorkers did not care about such nuances. They wanted their rectangle back, and other geographical details too. Dissatisfaction was palpable, and in 1979 the map was replaced.

  Still, the Vignelli map refused to vanish. It was included in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art, featured in exhibitions, and analyzed in history books. In 2008, Vignelli was even asked to create a limited-edition version, which sold out almost immediately. Then, Jay Walder, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (who left his post at the end of 2011), asked Vignelli to revise his 1972 map for the MTA’s The Weekender website, which informs the public of weekend service changes caused by maintenance projects. How sweet the irony!