In the early 1960s, Bell Systems was busy rolling out a new way for people to make phone calls. Called the Telephone Numbering Plan, the method was an effort to scale up the nation’s rapidly expanding telephone network by requiring every household or business account to have a 10-digit number based on location. It was a smart solution to a complex problem, but there was just one issue: It turned out the average person wasn't great at remembering a seemingly random string of numbers.
You might not know Ladislav Sutnar by name, but you certainly know one of his designs. Sutnar is the man who, while working on Bell's phonebooks, sandwiched the first three digits of your phone number between two parentheses, thus creating a crucial visual aid that gave structure to an otherwise unwieldy data set. This brilliant bit of information design was so successful, you’ve probably never thought about why it was there in the first place.
Sutnar is what graphic design writer and Sutnar scholar Steven Heller calls a “lost master.” Though lesser known than peers like Paul Rand and Saul Bass, the Czech-born designer is largely considered the grandfather of information design. In 1961, Sutnar published Visual Design in Action, in which he explored his particular brand of rational design principles. At the time, Suntar self-funded a limited edition of 3,000 copies, but the book has been out of print ever since that first run.
Now, Heller and a team of designers and publishers are looking to create a facsimile of the book to introduce Sutnar’s still-relevant design thinking to a new generation. The project, currently raising money on Kickstarter, promises to be an exacting reproduction of Sutnar’s 188-page original, down to the graphics, typography and paper weight (price: $62).
Birth of a Master
Since 1941, Sutnar had been working as the lead designer at Sweet's Catalog Service, a company that produced manufacturing catalogs for building supplies. During his time at Sweet's, Sutnar honed his skill for translating messy and complex sets of information into comprehensible, aesthetically driven designs.
Sutnar grew up in the time of the Bauhaus, which greatly influenced his systematic focus on graphic design. A decade before writing Visual Design in Action, he published Catalog Design Progress, a guidebook of sorts outlining the principles of designing a catalog. “For the average person, that sounds like watching paint dry,” Heller says. “But for a designer, it marks the beginning of information graphics.”
Heller says Sutnar would never have considered himself an “information designer" in the way that we use the term today, and fair enough; Sutnar’s work is far from the decorative interpretation of data we often see in infographics. Sutnar believed in rationality, grids, typographic hierarchies, and clarity. The designer created what he described in Catalog Design Progress as “visual traffic signs,” a standardized approach to leading the reader through dense fields of information. In Sutnar's world, information was useless without effective organization and presentation.
According to Heller, the early 1960s was a rough time for Sutnar. Tastes were shifting from his breed of regimented simplicity to favoring complexity and psychedelia. He was losing clients and what little notoriety he had. Visual Design In Action was in some ways the designer’s dossier. “He wanted to get work,” Heller says.
The book, accompanied by an exhibition of the designer’s work at Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, covered topics like how to use scale and repetition, as well as how to employ paragraph breaks, color, and typography as navigational tools. Sutnar set the entire text in italics to emphasize ideas. "He liked the rhythm of italics," says Heller, and "used punctuation marks as ways of helping the reader to stop and go." The book is, as Heller describes it, “really classic in one sense and totally relevant in another.” And indeed, looking at Sutnar’s work today, it’s hard to believe it ever fell out of favor. You can imagine if Sutnar was alive, he’d be successfully reveling in the precision of computer-aided design. In fact, Heller once argued that Sutnar's work was an early precursor to today's gridded web design.
Though Visual Design in Action has been hibernating for decades, it's amassed a cult following of designers who’ve long championed the value of Sutnar’s functional breed of graphic design. Reprinting the book, says Heller, is just another way to make Sutnar’s quiet legacy a little more known in the world. “His time was up when it was up,” Heller says. “And now his time has come back.”
