Isotype, the Proto-Infographic You Probably Didn't Know Existed

Infographics are everywhere. Over the last few years, they have become the most fashionable mechanism for transforming complex subjects into easily digestible snippets. Some of these artfully reveal hidden facets of even the most familiar topics; others are more like hideous-looking spam. But despite their recent explosion in popularity, infographics are far from new. The format has been experimented with in earnest since the early 1800s, though the development of a more modernized and familiar form picked up steam in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

One of the most important but under-appreciated contributors to the evolution of contemporary infographics was Austrian social scientist and economist, Otto Neurath. During his tenure as director of the Gesellschafts-und-Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy) in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, he and his colleagues, Marie Reidemeister and Gerd Arntz, set out to develop a system to revive dry statistics with vivid pictorial representations—Isotype.

The project was originally known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, but eventually became known as the Isotype as its ambitions began to expand beyond explaining local social and economic matters to Vienna’s inhabitants. Isotype is a nickname for the enterprise’s longer title, the International System of Typographic Picture Education.

Neurath and his team developed the principles of Isotype by blending linguistic and design concepts to present information in a fashion that was as innovative and intuitive as possible. The system was more generally intended to be a "technique for visualizing social statistics through pictorial means." According to Neurath, "to remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures."

The technique had a sophisticated philosophical and pedagogical core. The team established many rules and restrictions on the visual side of their work to keep it from straying too far from its primary purpose of education. One such rule stated that larger quantities were to be displayed by repetition of the same symbol and not enlargement of that symbol, as that was less accurate and more difficult to understand.

While Neurath focused on the philosophical underpinnings of Isotype, Marie, who later became his wife, was commonly known as the “transformer,” meaning that she was responsible for appropriately planning how to translate multi-faceted information into a visual schema. Arntz, meanwhile, was the primary artistic force behind Isotype’s simplified yet not simplistic imagery. It was his and Neurath’s goal “to make the pictograms universally understandable and as timeless as possible.”

When Neurath died unexpectedly in 1945, Marie continued the work. By the time she retired in 1971 and handed off her materials to the University of Reading, who currently run an informative website called “Isotype revisted,” Isotype had found outlets in the Netherlands, the US, the UK, and the Western Region of Nigeria. The latter was one of Marie’s favorite projects, something she believed was “a real test of the international ambitions of Isotype,” whereby she was tasked with creating pamphlets to educate semi-literate or illiterate Nigerians about the functioning of their government.

While infographics have moved on from the Neurath to embrace new designs and new technologies, his work hasn’t been discarded. In fact, one designer, Eugene Tjoa, is currently engaging in ongoing project in which he updates and animates old Isotype images. The project even has the approval of Gerd Arntz’s family. Tjoa’s results show that new and old can happily, and even fruitfully, coexist.

I’m no graphic design historian, so I admittedly cannot put any sort of quantification on precisely how much clout Isotype actually has in the current realm of visual data. But I frequently see echoes of the system's presence in the infographics that routinely land in my inbox or Facebook feed.

Isotype is just one of many progenitors to the modern day infographic. Certainly, there have been other players, including the work of masters like Edward Tufte. But there is no doubt that in the stream of influences that led to contemporary methods of visual data communication, Isotype can definitely claim a significant role.